Celestron PowerSeeker 40 AZ Review

Celestron PowerSeeker 40 AZ Review - Intro & Summary

Can you buy a funtional telescope for £30 with postage included? Well from my experince with the Celestron 40 AZ, no you can not. This telescope has a brand name printed on the box that may leed you to belive that it is a worthy piece of kit, but alas it is not.

It looks like it might do the job, but the quality of the lenses etc. is so so poor that even if you manage to line up the tescope using the very poor swivel then you will be dissapointed.

Celestron PowerSeeker 40 AZ Review - Whats in the Box

There is a lot of stuff in the box, when you open it up, and as the instruction manual had nothingh to do with what was in the box, it took me a few goes to suss out what was what.

1 x Telescope with Pre-attached targeting scope.
1 x Tripod
1 x Barlow Lense
1 x Rectifying Lense
2 x Objective (?) Lense
1 x 90 degree prism
1x cleaning cloth
Lots x Lense Caps

Now I would suggest that in addition to the scope and tripod one lense a 90 degree and barlow would have been sufficient, which may have upped the budget spent on the main scope. But there.

Various bits that come with the 40 AZ

Celestron PowerSeeker 40 AZ Review - Images / Pictures

The tripod is well made, and I was impressed with its quality.

It is a small scope nf from the outside looks OK

Celestron (by name)

Fitted with 1.5 x rectifying lense.

Celestron PowerSeeker 40 AZ Review - In Use

It is a real struggle to move the scope, the mount on the tripod results in much jerkinging around, and for example while trying to line up Jupiter on a reasonably high magnification, I gave up after around 20 minutes of trying.

If you were lucky enough to line up with an object of interest then the view that you would get is substandard, with much blurring and lots of dark patches all over the image.

If used on a lower magnification setting with the larger aperture eyepiece then images are not too bad, but no better than a cheap (£20) pair of binoculars.

Bearing in mind I rarely leave a negative review, but the product is a complete waste of money. A passing triviality of a kids birthday perhaps . . . but then that child would be put of telescope for life.

Celestron PowerSeeker 40 AZ Review - Conclusion

I bought this for £30 off of Amazon. I was not expecting much. I now realise that you will need to spend at least £100 pounds on a telescope for it to be worth putting together.

By contrast I have some binoculars that cost £100 (Optical Hardware - Elenor) which are a joy to use, and the family can pick them up and use them too, after wasting 3 - 4 hours trying to use this Celestron 40 AZ, I picked up the binoculars and for the first time saw the moons of jupiter. In my pursuit for high levels of magnification I neglected to read up. If you are buying anything for star gazing then go to the BBC Sky at Night Website and choose something with a good review from there. That is what I did with the binoculars and they have served me well.

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