Celestron 22403 Inspire 100AZ Refractor Telescope with Built-In Smartphone Adapter, Blue

Fairly light and easily portable.Very easy to align using the sight tool.Useful choice of magnification eye pieces.Moons of Jupiter, Saturns rings all easy to see.Great for starter.Straightforward to use. Very stable.Good value.Impressive.

Great telescope! I bought it as a gift for a friend, and they said it was easy to set up. They were even able to see Jupiter’s rings with their own eyes, which made them very happy! Overall, a fantastic purchase.

After watching “The Wonders of The Moon" documentary a few weeks ago, it really sparked my interest in the night sky. I am a complete novice and was looking for a decent starter telescope. I came across this one which also includes a smartphone adapter to take pics through the telescope which I thought was a nice added feature. It arrived well packed, and was really simple to put together, maybe ten minutes. There are parts that only need setting up once with batteries etc. The tripod is all ready to go out of the box, and the telescope part just slides on. No tools are required, which is great as I don’t own any! There’s a built in tray which holds the two eyepieces, which is lit by a removable torch in a red glow, and the red dot finder scope that helps align the telescope is very cool. On my first try I managed to capture a really nice picture of a crescent moon, and the lit accessory tray really made sense when standing in the dark in my garden. I could get started right away as there are batteries already included for the torch and finder scope. I look forward to playing with it some more!

A great first telescope, easy to set up and use, handle is easy to operate. With the purchase of a couple of additional eyepieces I've even been able to see the banding on Jupiter!

I bought this telescope for Christmas from Amazon as I had read good reviews about it with some minor criticisms here and there but I decided to give it a go but I was ultimately left disappointed by it. So, here are my pros and cons for this telescope.Pros:The telescope itself is pretty solid and well build with a chunky solid lens hood that is screwed on providing plenty of shielding for the lens. There are some plasticky bits to the scope but I can forgive them as for the most part it is pretty good.The optics of the scope are also quite good as and its a bonus that the diagonal adapter is the right way up so you can use it for both terrestrial and night sky viewing. I was quite impressed with the views I got of the moon and some great detail of its craters as they were nice and sharp. I managed to get some views of one of the constellations (Auriga I think). Jupiter and the Mars however were sadly no more than small dots with no detail but the again this is part of the problem of the setup itself which I will mention although if I had a clearer night sky and maybe better eyepieces, i could have seen more.The tripod on the plus side is very sturdy as well as quite heavy but it is more than adequate to hold the scope, which itself is just over 2kg, so it can easily hold that weight with no problems. The long handle of the tripod works fairly well for adjusting the scope and it is very easy to mount the telescope to the tripod itself. It also has a great stand attached for holding your eyepieces as well as slot for putting a small red light that is included with the packaging of the scope.The accessories you get with the scope are also fairly decent with the eyepieces 10mm and 20mm, providing good quality optics (well for me anyway but then I am a beginner!). It also has a neat inclusion of a small light that you can attach to the tripod stand to give you some source of red light, so you are not totally in the dark outside. There is also a red dot finderscope included for aligning your targets with your scope but you need to ensure the battery included is installed otherwise it won't work as I forgot to install it at first lol!Cons:As for the cons, the main one is the tripod, which I do appreciate is quite heavy but what is not great about it is the AZ mount itself and the handle as you cannot make subtle adjustments to the scope as it jiggles all over the place when you move it. And I found this really frustrating as I was trying to view Jupiter and kept swapping out eyepieces and slotting in a 2x barlow lens and each time I tried to find my target, it was impossible for me to keep the view through the eyepiece steady as it just kept jiggling all over the place again. Or also what would happen is when I tried to get a subject in view when I tightened the handle, it would cause the scope to sag a little meaning I would need to start all over again to keep the view in my eyepiece.I also felt that the tripod is simply a bit too short at just under 4 feet, you cannot comfortably look up at objects such as the planets of Jupiter or Mars or constellations without really kneeling down even with a 90 degree diagonal attached. I feel you really would need a chair to make yourself comfortable enough to look through the scope when its pointed higher up. So by the end of my second viewing session my back ended up feeling pretty stiff and store from having to kneel over so much!The scope itself is also not free of faults either as the focuser is pretty wobbly too when trying to focus in on subjects but it does at least settle down after leaving it for a few seconds. Also I found one of the knobs of the focuser was loose and needed to be tightened up, so I was effectively using just one of the knobs at times, which is not great. The diagonal itself also feels very cheap and plasticky and doesn't even tighten up properly yet even the Celestron Travelscope 70mm I have feels more solid overall than this scope does and you can also swap out diagonals, which you cannot appear to with this scope.Another problem was the red dot finderscope, which frankly was crap as even though I managed to get the dot to come on, I could not adjust the red dot view with the knobs on the finderscope itself. So, no matter how much I turned the knobs the red dot would not move at all. So, I found this also pretty frustrating. Maybe I just had a dud one but its still annoying that it didn't work right.So, overall I think the Inspire 100AZ is decent as a scope but it has its problems and its tripod makes for some very frustrating viewing difficulties that makes it hard for me to recommend. So, I have sent this back and will be looking for another scope and in the meantime, I will continue using my Celestron Travelscope 70mm, which is not bad at all for the money and is at least well built and you can swap out diagonal adapters.

Took about 15 minutes to setup, aligning the spotter scope with the telescope was very easy. after about 10 - 15 minutes of looking at the night sky was looking at Jupiter and 4 of its moons. Superb telescope

Expensive toy. Magnification is poor and not much better than normal eyesight, certainly for stars or planets which are just twinkles in the sky you gain no benefit from the scope whilst normal eyesight at least gives yiu the patterns. The smartphone holder is a very poorly designed gimmick that does not hold the phone securley and was impossible to align. The view finder and eyepiece are again awful as you have to get on your hands and knees to see through them if looking at anything more than 45 degrees.

Firstly and most importantly: Right out of the box, you can have a good time with this telescope! This is NOT a department store hobby-killing piece of junk like so many cheap telescopes can be.Bought this telescope in Apr24 and has been an excellent tool to start my journey through the night sky with. The telescope itself is excellent for beginners. Easy to set up, lightweight and comes with some nice features like the mobile phone adapter and built-in light.Minor Flaw: After a few months of use, the altitude axis (up and down) is still very smooth and sharp, however the azimuth axis (swivel left and right) is starting to become a bit stiff. Not too much of an issue yet but will become frustrating in time.Upgrade Your Experience: The eyepieces that it comes with are usable but 'meh'. If you want to bump up your experience without buying a whole new telescope, upgrade the eyepieces to a set of decent Svbony red/gold line wide-angle lenses and you will have a great time with this telescope looking at the moon and planets etc.