Celestron NexStar 127SLT Mak Computerized Telescope (Black)

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Price: $424.95    

Product Feature

• High quality 127mm (5") Maksutov-Cassegrain
• Quick-release fork arm mount, optical tube and accessory tray for quick tool no set up
• StarPointer finderscope to help with alignment and accurately locating objects
• Auxiliary port for additional accessories such as GPS accessory
• Includes "The SkyX" Planetarium software

Product Description

Designed to be an affordable entry level to mid-level computerized GoTo telescope, the NexStar SLT refractors, reflectors, and Maks are available in the most popular sizes and are loaded with valuable design features. With preassembled, adjustable stainless steel tripods, and quick release fork arms and tubes, NexStar SLT telescopes can be set up in a matter of minutes � with no tools required! You can see details of the lunar surface, Venus and its phases, polar caps on Mars, Jupiter and its four moons, Saturn with its rings plainly visible and much more! Most NexStar SLT� �s can also be used as a land-based spotting telescope.

Celestron NexStar 127SLT Mak Computerized Telescope (Black) Review

November, 2012: After owning this product for 18 months, I am downgrading it.

The optics of this scope are pretty good. And the idea of an alt-az tracking mount with go-to features is sound. But the kit as actually delivered is problematic. If my experience is any indication, about half of the time, the kit will be out of commission due to failure of critical components.

As I noted in my original review, the Finderscope failed shortly after I got the kit, making the scope extremely difficult to aim and steer, and impossible to align for purposes of the tracking feature.

Since then, the Altitude motor has failed twice, and the plastic bracing of the tripod split clear through--fortunately NOT while it was holding the scope tube. Each of these situations has meant 2-1/2 months of the kit being out of commission while I begged Celestron for a return materials authorization number, shipped the materials to Celestron, waited for Celestron to check the parts in, and then waited 6 weeks for them to service or repair the parts.

The root cause is apparently low-quality materials, including cheap Chinese motors.

Celestron sells the SLT mount, hand-controller, and tripod as a kit without any optics for about $350. I recommend steering clear of that kit and any kit containing a tripod or mount made by Celestron, including their much-ballyhooed self-aligning SkyProdigy mounts, which, in their photos, appear to be made from the same underlying components.

At this point I am more seriously looking at products from Orion and Meade to replace the unreliable components from Celestron.

However, when the product actually works, it works fairly well, as I explained in my original review of this product from over a year ago, which follows below.--------------------------------

Disclaimer: I'm a rank beginner, and this is my first telescope.

Intermediate and advanced scope owners tend to recommend a larger Dobsonian scope (eg Orion 6- or 8-inch) without motors, as the way to get a lot of optics at a low price. But knowing that I was going to struggle to find anything fainter than Saturn, I shopped for something smaller and lighter that I'd be more likely to use, with tracking so once I found something, I could show it to somebody else. Tracking was important to me because the Earth's rotation can otherwise make something drift out of the field of vision in just a few seconds.

A telescope can basically be mounted two ways: Alt-Az and Equatorial. An Alt-Az mount has two degrees of freedom: Altitude (angle from nadir to zenith) and Azimuth (compass point). An equatorial mount can be pictured as the same two degrees of freedom tilted up so that zenith is replaced with the north (or south) pole, altitude is replaced with latitude, and azimuth is replaced with longitude. On an equatorial mount, tracking is just counter-rotating once every 24 hours on the longitude axis while doing nothing on the other axis, so a clock mechanism is all that's needed. Tracking is more complex on an Alt-Az mount, so a computer is needed. But physically, equatorial mounts are a bit more elaborate and thus expensive because the tilt towards north creates balance considerations that alt-az mounts don't experience.

So the upshot is that a budget alt-az mount that can do tracking is likely to have a computer. So, why not have a Go-To database with it? The database on this system has only about 4000 objects in it--but for somebody like me, that's plenty, besides which larger Go-To databases tend to contain tens of thousands of things that are too faint to see in a 127mm scope. I find the Go-To feature a blessing, showing me a bunch of things I wouldn't have been able to find by myself, and describing them in short encyclopedia entries that scroll across the hand-controller's display.

The system ships in one big box, which is a bit awkward for handling. I used the internal box and bubble wrap plus some foam rubber of my own to fit the scope tube into a wheeled backpack, with tray, eyepieces, diagonal, finderscope, hand-controller, and accessory tray in their original containers or bubble wrap in side pockets; a separate wheeled duffel proved perfect for the fork arm, tripod, and a red-LED flashlight that I purchased separately. That made the whole system quite tolerably portable.

The enclosed red-dot finderscope died after a little bit of use, apparently because internal wires got torn by the finderscope-alignment process. Celestron replaced it, and the replacement appears to have a sheet of plastic protecting the wires. Without a finderscope (a low- or no-magnification tool that you use like a gun sight), it's very difficult to aim a telescope at anything, so the scope was essentially crippled for everything except lunar observation until the replacement came--and aiming at the moon was a bit of a struggle. A little QA problem, but kudos for their customer-service.

This is a Maksutov-Cassegrain scope, which should not need collimation, but it arrived slightly out of alignment. The primary mirror can be aligned
to the secondary with careful use of 2mm and 3mm allen wrenches (not supplied), and I recommend a pinhole cap (not supplied) for the procedure. Faint stars should turn into symmetrical doughnuts when slightly unfocused. I find that having done this once, the scope holds its collimation well.

The set-up instructions worked for me the first time, and about 30 minutes into my first night, I was looking at Saturn. I recommend reading the instructions carefully to get the best results from three-star or two-star alignment (the latter requires that you be able to identify the two stars). For each star, you'll first align it in the finderscope, press "enter", then center it in the eyepiece, before pressing "align". The mount wants the last moves to be up and right, so it can take into account the play in the motor gears, else when you ask it to find things, they may be off-center or slightly outside the field of vision. The computer has a database of cities from which it can estimate your position on Earth; that combined with the current time from a cell phone is generally accurate enough to orient it. But if you're taking it to a remote field, you might want to look up the latitude and longitude ahead of time.

And a remote field is a wise idea--the darker, the better. Telescopes do magnify, but their main purpose is to collect light--to show you things too faint to see otherwise. City haze and nearby light can interfere with that. Still, even in a city, this scope easily shows Saturn and Jupiter with some detail, craters on the Moon, double stars, and some star clusters. Darker skies are needed if you want to try to see nebulae, remote galaxies, and other faint objects.

The included diagonal--a mirror creating a 90-degree joint--makes the scope more comfortable to use and gets the image right-side-up, though it is in mirror image. If you're viewing fainter objects and can deal with an upside-down-and-backwards image and a little awkwardness, you can put the eyepiece directly on the scope tube to eliminate the light-loss from the diagonal. Doing so shortens the tube substantially, so you'll have to re-focus.

A minor design flaw in the fork arm is that the hand controller (and optional external power) plug into the rotating part of the base rather than the stationary part. The computer compensates for that with a "cordwrap" feature that remembers how far the arm has rotated, so that when you ask it to show you an object, it may make a just-under-360-degree rotation in the opposite direction to avoid getting making a mess of the wires.

Motor speeds vary from tracking speed to 9 faster speeds arranged in powers of 2, so the fastest speed, [ (2^9) * tracking speed ], is about 3 degrees per second. That's a lot slower than you can tilt it by hand, but moving the scope by hand makes it lose its alignment, unlike the active-passive sensor systems on some more expensive systems. I haven't found this to be a problem.

8 AA alkaline batteries in the fork arm power the system, and are good for many hours of use--Celestron says about 3 hours, but I used my first set for about 9 hours over several nights before they unceremoniously died. Celestron doesn't recommend rechargeable NiCads, claiming they don't produce a high enough voltage to even start the system. A 12V center-positive external power supply can be used, and Celestron and other vendors offer a longer-life rechargeable battery system just for that purpose.

When I've used this at fairly dark locations, I've been able to see quite a bit of detail. The optics seem very nice.

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