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

Product Information

With the Inspire 100AZ, you can make out Mercury’s phases (albeit with some difficulty) and Venus’s phases are easy to see. The trick is to get the Inspire 100AZ roughly underneath or above your target using the pan axis and then tweak the tilt axis to get it into the field of view. I have ground mirrors up to 16” for my own telescopes, and I am now working on even larger homemade optics. It's an impressive piece of design and relatively easy to use, though it does help enormously if you have a spare 20 mm eyepiece to leave in place.

It’s a little too bright to use as a plain flashlight at night, but the diffuser built into the tripod makes it into a really great tray light to softly illuminate your accessories without completely ruining your night vision. At the end of the Inspire 100AZ’s tube is a slight peak to help keep ambient light out of the optics.

This dew shield is really a bit short for the telescope, and the injection-moulded plastic surface on the inside is quite shiny. You won’t quite be able to resolve globular star clusters or see much in the way of detail in galaxies, even under dark skies, but the 100AZ can still show you the entirety of the Messier catalogue, and a wealth of detail on the Moon and planets.

This telescope is going to be a great fit for a beginner or anyone who does not want to fiddle or fuss with more complicated telescopes. This filter screws onto your eyepiece or star diagonal and makes many nebulae, like the Orion Nebula, stand out more. Observing can be a misery if you're very cold, so warm clothing in layers is important, with warm socks and a woolly cap etc.The Inspire 80AZ offers the longest focal length in the Inspire line for higher power views of the planets and is packed with features never seen before on entry level telescopes. Apart from the features we've already listed above, however there's not much in the way of extras supplied. Celestron actually sells a pretty nice prism star diagonal, which they include with their higher-end telescopes by default. Uranus and Neptune are unfortunately rather unexciting with the Inspire 100AZ-they’re difficult to distinguish from stars, their disks are so small that they are barely resolvable, and their moons are simply dim enough to be well out of reach of a telescope with only 100mm of aperture. During my tests I pointed the Celestron Inspire 100AZ at Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, as well as the moon moving through its many phases.