Customer Ratings & Reviews

A gift for my husband's birthday, and he was so happy to receive this particular telescope! So many telescopes to choose from, but after researching and reading other reviews, this telescope is lightweight and seemed the easiest to use and set up. Best of all it comes with an app to help you manually direct to objects viewable in your sky, via your phone without internet or wifi. The alignment was a snap and the clarity is fantastic. Both my husband and I love this telescope!

Really cool telescope. The app is a little tricky at times but once you have it all dialed in right you can find what you are looking for in minutes. First night i used it i observed jupiter and its rings with the lenses provided with it. It is upgradable with better lense combos. Recommend a step stool for shorter people.

This my first telescope. Very pleased with it. Easy to assemble. The smart phone guidance works great. One small issue is the finder scope. It uses a small disc battery. I forgot to turn the switch off, And it went dead in just a couple of days. No big deal, just annoying. Also, I have not been able to find any information on how to maintain the telescope. I'm sure it will eventually need some readjustment on mirror, etc.

Nice telescope for a beginner, or for anyone for portability and ease of use. Easy manual positioning and a red dot finder that works well. Manual slow motion controls are a bit rough but ok. Very Clear and bright images under lower power. Great for the Moon, brighter planets and even some deep sky Messier objects.

App makes a lot easier to find stars. I had to by lens to magnify it even more. It’s good, app makes it better.

Best ever gift for my son easy to assemble and use

This telescope is super easy to set up and my wife and I love set it up on night with clear skies. The information on the app is super interesting and informative. It is easy to move and put away.

My family loves this telescope so far. Bought a travel bag on amazon and took it to Yosemite with us and got to see a couple of shooting stars whiz through our sights. Precision adjustments, east side viewing, and nice app to aide in locating viewable points of interest

I bought this from Best buy a few days ago, and have hand 2 nights to use it for a few hours. First, let me say this, Im very experienced with telescopes, observing, Astrophotography etc. Astronomy is my passion and I own probably a dozen serious telescopes, tripods, mounts, accessories, astro cameras etc. I would not recommend this telescope. Ill start with the good, the Optical tube itself isnt bad at all. the optics arent bad, the focuser, although plasticy, is smooth and accepts larger 2" eyepieces and the 5" f/5 mirror offers some pleasing wide field views, and does decently well on the lunar, planetary, and brighter deep sky objects. The app itself, Star Sense Explorer, is really cool, its the best part of the whole package. it can be a little buggy but in general, its very accurate, and allows you to locate tons of objects with ease. The Bad: the tripod/ mount aren't great.. although it does have slow motion controls which is a plus, its cheap feeling, made of plastic, its shaky, with vibration taking a long time to settle down, and wost of all, probably the deal breaker for me, is that the telescope can not point to Zenith.. or anywhere near it.. the scope maxes out at maybe 70°, hitting the tripod. this blocks the scope from viewing a huge portion of the sky, the darkest and clearest part of it.. which is absolutely unacceptable for an astronomical telescope. The mount simply doesn't work with this optical tube. The accessories are also pretty poor.. a 25mm and 10mm Kellner, made with cheap plastic barrels, while my work acceptably well in a slower refractor, are heavily abberated and very poor performers in an f/5 Newtonian. Coma, and field curvature smear out stars everywhere but the exact center of view. Overall, the decent tube and good app are nullified by poor accessories and a completely incompatible tripod. Im may just use the OTA on another mount and adapt the star sense dock to another telescope. If you want a real telescope, buy from a telescope dealer. The new 8"-10" dobsonian versions of this series would be far far better, certainly worth the extra few hundred.

Very good for the price. Has great clarity and can see quite a bit with it.

Good scope.. but for this price one can get many more features even within celestron brand. The app they provide ( which supposedly finds objects in sky from your phone ) is a nightmare to calibrate.. .. The plate resolve tech they use in the app needs a computer not a phone. It lags like anything!! Be aware that the mechanism of clipping the phone to the scope and the pointing to an object (via a 90 degree mirror they provide ) has too much room for error.. There are just too many moving parts. So no matter what you do you are almost always fat off from the target.. and it might get quite frustrating if you are a beginner. It’ll take you close to an object but realistically you would have to do quite a bit of work. The tripods are light and even the tiniest of vibration is amplified.. But thats what you’d get for this price. Counter weights are recommended especially if you are outside and its windy.. The lens is pretty good imo. The views of moon were amazing, and clearly visible Saturn rings. Try going outside the city to really appreciate this scope. My recommendation is to go with a scope with an inbuilt goto system for this price if thats what you want, else get something with similar aperture (or even 90mm) without any goto system. There is no point in paying for a goto system such as this one because its far from useful.. In general, Reflectors begin to standout at around 8inch aperture... So I can’t see a very good reason to spend so much money on just a 130mm reflector..

Overall the telescope is good. A few things to consider… the app does not work well with the positioning of the telescope and some parts on this scope break a bit easy. I used mines very rarely and have the parts glued with superglue which makes it work. Overall pretty decent scope. :/

Good telescope, mediocre eyepieces with little eyerelief. Have been able to view Jupiter and Saturn with them but lots of chromatic aberration. Will replace eyepieces. The starsense software is excellent though and can assist in figuring out what's viewable in even a light polluted sky. Please learn about viewing objects in night sky and what is possible where you live before having unreasonable expectations of what telescope can view.

I am by no means an expert, but this was easy to set up and use. Also its amazing what this telescope allows you to see with such detail and clarity. Im thoroughly enjoying it.

Easy set-up and my daughter loves it. She can see so much. The app is an awesome addition. Great telescope for beginners and intermediate users.

Fantastic starter telescope and I love the StarSense Explorer App. This is my first attempt at using a telescope, a hobby I got interested in because of the pandemic. I did a lot of research before deciding on this one, but I am very happy with my choice. For those who are novice telescope users like me, I think this is a great place to start. I also feel like I can grow with this telescope for years too and continue to learn. It is a bit weighty but not anything that I can't move around myself without any issues. I look forward to getting more lenses and filters to use with it as I move forward in learning more about it! I have other Celestron optic instruments and have really enjoyed them and they have all been very well-made, this telescope is no different.

Great telescope for beginners. The assembly was a little tricky but do check out YouTube tutorials before assembling.

Already created great memories with my daughters in looking at Saturn, Jupiter, the moon, the Andromeda galaxy, and Mars through this telescope! My daughter actually took couple of great pictures just using her smartphone through the telescope lens. The app also makes it a breeze to locate what you want to look for. It is a bit pricey for a "beginner's telescope" but is worth it.

This is my first telescope and I am very pleased with this purchase. I decided to go with the StarSense 130mm because this model has the slow motion controls which make it much easier to make fine adjustments. Assembly was easy and the tripod is sturdy. Upgrading the eyepieces is something well worth considering. I purchased 9mm and 5mm Celestron X-Cel LX eyepieces which have a 60 degree field of view and 16mm eye relief. The StarSense app works great with my iPhone 8 plus also.

Great telescope and my kid loves it. Used it many times this summer to teach and show my son what is beyond our planet and it has grown his interest in astronomy and science in general. The learning experience and excitement that has sparked in him is priceless! I really like it myself and it has me wanting to learn more about the astronomy and the universe.