31150 LCM 114 Series Computerised Newtonian Reflector Telescope, Silver

No dislikes but is a useful piece of kit when scanning the night sky and will stay fixed on a planet at a touch of a button and is very impressive in seeking the planets you program in a nice product well worth the money . Thank you Amazon for a prompt delivery Earl gaunt

this was my second teliscope that i had got, the first one that i got was a manuel telicope. this teliscope took some getting used to, with all the controles on the hand set and everything but once you are used to it then it is amazing. the views and sights that i have already seen are fab, i have already seen stars like betelguese and planets like juipter in about 4 days of me getting it. if it is your first telicope than it will be perfect. the only down point to the telicope some people says that the tripod is unsteady and the image is shaky, but this doesnt matter and i havnt knowtist this, it doesnt matter anyway because images shake because you are looking through earth atmosphere. also just to go along with this telicope i would recomend the celestron eye piece kit, because you will only get two eye pieces with this telicope and they are fab but you will need more to look at other items. no doubts this is an amazing piece of kit

This is a a good scope and well worth the money. The only thing that has let it down so far is the inadequate finder scope, which I have replaced with a Telrad with good results. I would have given it 5 stars if it wasn't for that. Easy to assemble and worth reading the instructions for set-up. It makes things easier as you progress. Having said that, I've only managed 'solar system align' so far due to the levels of light pollution in my area. I will have to find a better observing site soon. However, that was painless and easy and then I took a bit of the computer guided tour before returning to Jupiter. It's moons are clearly visible with a 25mm lens and I saw the cloud bands faintly using a 2 x Barlow and a 6mm lens. I bought this primarily because of its portability and it delivers well on that front. It is light and easy to move around. The scope detaches from the mount quickly and the tripod is collapsible. Ideal for popping in the boot and a quick re-assemble at the other end. Just what was required. Takes 8 AA batteries and I've been using rechargable ones. They seem to last a reasonable amount of time. Good fun getting to know this scope and so far it's done everything it says it will do. Lots of fun to be had ahead.

could not see anything

I bought this telescope for my son's 9th birthday (young, but a keen astronomer and founder member of the local astronomy club). The verdict after 18 months use: excellent! At club astronomy nights he is often the first to set up, and, using the fully computerised GOTO (the computer is built-in), observes more objects than many much older and more experienced astronomers. A few points to note: The internal battery pack is good for an hour or two (using rechargeable batteries), but for longer sessions I've bought him an external battery and cable. The external power connector socket is a bit unreliable - its a pity it does not have some sort of firm cable retention. It is unavoidable that objects at higher elevation place the eyepiece low (near the ground). I always wear a pair of workman's knee-pads to help me grovel!. When automatically moving to objects at high elevation the scope sometimes runs into the tripod (it isn't cleaver enough to work out that this is going to happen) - this then usually requires realignment from scratch. This can sometimes be avoided by manually moving the telescope near the object first, but sometimes you just have to wait until the object is lower in the sky. The Celestron "red dot" finder (on all the budget Celestron scopes) is completely useless. I've fitted a Rigel Quikfinder ("mini-Telrad") finder that works a dream. Even taking these issues into account, this scope is fantastic value.

I purchased this product now that I have retired, and both my wife and I wanted a fairly cheap, portable and easy to use telescope for looking at the stars up on the moors. This telescope seemed to fit the bill and we decided to buy it from Amazon. When it arrived I proceeded to set it up at home to get the hang of doing it. All the pieces of the telescope were all included, so that was OK, and following the quick start guide was easy and I has the telescope was unpacked set up in 15 minutes! I also read the full manual; I tend to do this sort of thing! OK so far, that night the sky was clear so we put the telescope in and old duvet in the car so as not to get it out of alignment and we went up on the moors and that’s when the troubles started. Oh the telescope worked very well but trying to get it set up on stars so that we could do the star alignment was virtually impossible. The trouble was the wretched StarPointer, its rubbish; we could not get anywhere near getting a star in the main scope at all. I had to sight down the telescope body to roughly line up a star then hunt for it in the eyepiece. It took two hours just to get the star alignment done, and by then we were cold and fed up so we decided to go home, very disappointing. Forget what it says in the manual about the StarPointer, it is inaccurate, for a start the pointer does not have one red dot but two! The manual is vague and does not tell you that you have to move your eye point until both dots line up, and you have to keep doing this until you get both dots and the star lined up after pre-positioning the star in the main scope. It took a lot of investigation on the internet, and figuring out to solve this problem. The advice on the Celestron site about lining up the Star Pointer in daylight makes sense (and it’s not in the manual!) but the only problem with that is the two red dots disappear in the bright light, so I did the lining up after dark using distant street lights, yet to prove this has worked as clouds and rain are stopping play. The whole StarPointer matter, in my opinion very fiddly and absolutely time wasting and messy. Also it could be a bit higher (1/2 inch?) to allow for people who wear glasses, which I do. So in conclusion the telescope is fine except for the above mentioned and that is reflected in the 3 star rating, it’s a shame to spoil a good package with one small item.

I managed to assemble the telescope very easily in less than 4 minutes. The hardest thing to do really was alignment using the Sky Align option, this is simpl;y because the city i live in in the UK is not listed in the program. so you need to use a city that is close top you rather than the one you are actually in. The control unit is easy to use, the finder scope is not that difficult to align really, just remember to put it on the telescope the right way round lol. I would highly recommend this telescope to somebody looking for a beginners scope, and there are a lot of optional extras available if you want to upgrade the system at a later date.

very good forlooking at planets