Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Most folks like reflectors but all of that collimating just turns me off. My AstroMaster is always ready to go in a minute's notice and where I live (southern Louisiana) that's important. Our weather is cloudy for a large portion of the year so when the sky does clear I don't have time to play around with aligning mirrors. This scope is plenty powerful enough to check out the moon in great detail, Jupiter (you can see the cloud bands) and Saturn (rings are visible). It is also fine for the larger and brighter Messier objects like M31 (Andromeda Galaxy) and M42 (Orion Nebula). I do suggest eventually getting the Celestron lens addon kit for it though as that opens up so many more options and the lenses are just a better quality. Lastly I will comment on the tripod. I am giving this scope a 5 star rating DESPITE the tripod. It's not that it's flimsy, it's fairly sturdy, but the clutch system makes it really hard to get it set onto a moving object and then to re-position when it moves. Honestly, I usually just mount this scope on top of one of my sturdy video tripods and it works even better. There are threads on the bottom of the scope's dovetail mount that allow you to mount it to a standard tripod and that wins lots of brownie points with me.