If you’re willing to do some DIY and find a PowerSeeker 114EQ for under $50 or so, you could build a Dobsonian mount for it, equip it with a good finder and eyepieces, and be rewarded with some surprisingly good views. Should I buy a used Celestron PowerSeeker 114EQ? Getting it pointed at the Moon would be a massive success. Coupled with the insanely bad finderscope and the unusable eyepieces provided with the telescope, we wouldn’t exactly have high hopes for your ability to see anything with this telescope. You will constantly be fumbling with the telescope crashing into the mount, moving of its own accord the instant you let go of it, or literally toppling over to the ground. However, the 114EQ is not exactly small, and basically can’t balance properly on the mount. The EQ1 isn’t actually terrible it’s made out of a mix of aluminium and plastic and does just fine holding a small telescope or a DSLR and lens. The PowerSeeker EQ scopes all come with the same EQ1 equatorial mount. You would be best off unscrewing the lenses from the finder and sighting through the empty tube. Not only does this finder have poor optics and a slide-tube focusing mechanism that is almost impossible to adjust correctly, but it doesn’t fit in the bracket well and basically doesn’t ever stay aligned with the telescope. Lastly, the PowerSeekers come with a plastic 5×24 finderscope to aim the telescope. You can use it as a spare lens cap or throw it in the garbage. The 3x Barlow included with all PowerSeeker telescopes is made out of plastic, completely useless, and exists purely so Celestron can advertise the telescopes as capable of over 600 power – which almost no telescope is capable of on a consistent basis, especially not a small and wobbly beginner instrument – and serves as purely marketing bogus. The PowerSeeker 4mm Ramsden eyepiece also has the soda straw experience, with the bonus of providing too much magnification to be actually useful (225x) and also requiring jamming your eyeball up to the tiny lens to see anything through it (which won’t be much, trust us). As a side effect, this prism massively reduces sharpness, sucks up a good portion of the light entering the eyepiece, and reduces the apparent field of view to around 30 degrees, which makes using it feel like you’re looking through a soda straw. The included 20mm eyepiece, providing 45x with the Celestron PowerSeeker 114EQ, is supposedly a Kellner, but it has an erecting prism in it to flip the image right-side up, so that you can view birds with your massive and wobbly Newtonian reflector on an equatorial mount (this is actually why Celestron includes it – to market it as usable for terrestrial applications). Not one of these has anything resembling quality. You get a 20mm eyepiece, a 4mm eyepiece, a 3x Barlow lens, and a 5×24 finderscope. The accessories included with the Celestron PowerSeeker 114EQ are, like all PowerSeeker accessories, atrocious. The scope comes with a pair of tube rings for attaching it to the mount, which allows you to slide and rotate the tube as needed for balance as well as put the eyepiece in a convenient and comfortable location. The 114EQ has a 1.25” rack-and-pinion focuser, and thanks to the long focal ratio, collimating it is quite easy, if not bordering on trivial. At this aperture and focal length, a spherical mirror provides images that are well within the tolerances of a typical parabolic mirror while being extremely easy and cheap to manufacture. These scopes have been around for decades and provide great images with little in the way of the coma that plagues faster focal ratio instruments. The Celestron PowerSeeker 114EQ is a standard 114mm f/8 Newtonian with a spherical primary mirror.
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