Celestron Reviews 14

18 months ago I bought a Evolution 6 Telescope. All good so far. 6 months later I added a sky sense camera to aid alignment. No matter where I used it the alignment almost always failed to work. I eventually got it working but had trouble focussing using the focus knob. So, I invested in a focus motor. I was told that Would be able to use the scope, the sky sense and the focus motor via my tablet using the sky portal. Once I managed to get it working, before the focus motor control tabs disappeared from my sky portal page. I contacted Celestron customer service who suggested I download the CMI firmwear update. I tried, oh how I tried!! It would download but my MacBook (important point) would allow me to open the files stat that it could not establish whether this programme carried a virus. I emailed customer support at Celestron UK only to be told the firmwear manager only runs on windows not on Mac book or other Apple products. This raised two questions. 1. It is no longer 1995 where Apple products were only available to the rich. 2. Why doesn't Celestron write a version of the CFM for Safari? This is 2025 and I have to get hold of a further device using this second rate operating system to update equipment less than two years old that IMHO should have the latest firmware installed. Celestron suggested I reinstall everything. I did , nothing changed

Date of experience: May 08, 2025

Bought a motor drive for a cool price of £159, got it out, controller broken out the box. OK must've been unlucky, bought another one returned the last one, wait a week. It has the exact same issue! The quality control for something of this price is completely unacceptable.

Date of experience: March 06, 2025

Poor quality, easily fall apart, do not buy.

Date of experience: January 04, 2025

Bought a red dot starfinder from Amazon which doesn’t work. Checked battery etc and still not working. Asked Amazon for a replacement and they pointed me to celestron tech support who replied to my first email and said they were passing it onto the UK team who would be in touch.
Never heard from them again despite a number of emails asking for an update.
Worst customer service I’ve ever come across and I certainly won’t be buying any more products from them 😡

Date of experience: February 22, 2024

I paid hundreds of dollars for a celestron skyscout personal planetarium. I find out a few days after buying this thing that celestron ceased all factory updates for this device back in 2015, rendering the entire device completely useless. Multitudes of other people who purchased this super expensive machine now have a 300 dollar paperweight as well. It's utterly inconceivable that a company would market such a sophisticated and expensive machine then totally walk away from any further support. Celestron hung us all out to dry on this complete waste of money and a class action lawsuit should be filed over this. This total disregard for basic customer service is reprehensible on every possible level imagineable. I will never ever again spend another nickel with this poor excuse of a company. I should have taken the money i threw away on this worthless product and donated it to charity, at least there would then be some justification for my now empty pockets. I literally cannot sell this skyscout for any amount of money because celestron allowed these devices to be of no further use to anyone who is unfortunate enough(like me!) to own one. This company clearly illustrates total negligence at it's finest!

Date of experience: December 24, 2023

Terrible customer service, purchased Celestron Outland X 10x42 Binoculars, missing strap piece. They are unable to provide a replacement part. Just getting a runaround from their customer service team. Do not buy their products if you need any assistance. JFQ-784-29561

Date of experience: December 11, 2023

I sent in a skyprodigy mount for replacement/repair after mount has randomly started to throw errors and fail to work on hand controller just past 2 years of average use (maybe once every other week on warm season). I tried it with other nexstar controller and mount wasn't responding confirmed this was a mount issue.
As scope was slightly past 2 years old, they take it in as a "courtesy" repair which is the least they should do for scope priced over 1k!!

I paid the costs to ship item from Canada to US in a decent padded packaging but they started to come up with excuses such as package was damaged on transit which broke the (was already failing) mount, and UPS won't handle packages the same way they used to etc. saying they can't cover the servicing fees anymore.

I requested the photos which didn't show any cosmetic damage whatsoever but customer service kept pushing back saying the vertical axis was moving freely by hand (which they usually do normally with gt/slt mounts as if that was the problem).

After a month of back and forth with escalations, I gave up on Celestron to cover expenses and asked for a quote which exceeded 350 US$. They added hand control replacement fees, shroud cover fees etc. quite inflated in other words.

TLDR; stay away from Celestron. They are not what they used to be, I owned their products since 2006 and starting in early 2010's they are nothing but all downhill with the quality and after sales support of their products.

This has been one of the worst aftersales support experiences I have seen and I strongly encourage you to look somewhere else.

Date of experience: April 12, 2023

I love my 9.25 Evolution, but trying to get any real help from Celestron isn't happening. They have had an ongoing issue for 3 years now about issues with their program called Celestron Firmware manager. It's required if you have a goto telescope. They haven't updated it to run with Windows 10 or 11. Some people are finding work arounds, but I had to go as far as to by a refurbished laptop that had Windows 7 on it. I was finally able to update my scope! Repeated emails to Celestron tech support did no good. They were either convinced I was doing something wrong, or they just didn't want to admit fault. You can search on Cloudy Nights and find several chains of topics dealing with just this issue. They are supposed to be the leading telescope manufacturer, but they don't even stand behind their own products.

Date of experience: November 02, 2022

In December 2019, my family bought me a Celestron NexStar 5SE Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope for Christmas. The last telescope I had owned was a 4” aperture, 700mm Greenkat Newtonian, which unfortunately sustained damage to the primary mirror and was therefore discarded.

After several observing sessions with the 5SE, I decided to clean the corrector plate and eyepiece lens. As I started on the corrector plate, I noticed what appeared to be a kind of wheat-grain “husk” or similar, stuck under the plate’s retaining ring at about the front 10 o’clock position. In looking more closely, I discovered that this husk was not in fact outside but actually inside the tube, behind the corrector plate glass next to the plate’s support flange. ( On reflection, this came as no surprise really, as I had only then recently discovered that the telescope was made in China. Like many, I’ve historically had much disappointment with products made there. )

I contacted Celestron UK informing them about this and was surprised to be told that this situation was straightforward enough for me to rectify myself. Since this was a brand new and delicate piece of expensive equipment, I declined to do this, stating that as this was a manufacturing defect, I wanted it sorted under warranty. Afterwards, having received the tube back from Celestron, I noticed that they had in fact sent a new one, i.e., the serial number was different - so perhaps it wasn’t that easy to fix after all !

Then in November of 2020, I found that the “red dot” finder scope was beginning to perform intermittently when the rheostat wheel was turned. I reported this to Celestron who sent me out a replacement. However this one is monstrous by comparison and instead of the red dot, it shows a sort of wide set of red concentric circles which make it very difficult to slew on to the target star. I put up with this one for a while but then, on following an Internet tutorial, I had some success repairing the original. ( It worked for a while but sadly has recently begun failing again. Apparently the rheostat control knob slips past its own stop and this pulls on the wires. )

While I feel that the Go To function is good, I have to say that I have been fairly unimpressed with the over all quality of the imagery with the 5SE. When I think back on using the modest 4” Greenkat, I found that the Andromeda Galaxy core was very easy to see - the Celestron is somewhat indistinct by comparison ; M57, the Lyra ring nebula appeared as a definite smoke-ring shape while the 5SE displays it as a round blob. With M27, the Dumbbell Nebula, the Greenkat offered a view which had 2 distinct dumbbell shaped lobes while the Celestron’s image appears to be more circular. And even with the GoTo function, if the initial Sky Alignment isn’t absolutely spot on then a bit of hunting for the Globular Cluster in Hercules is invariably required.

In other words, a 4” manual telescope which I owned over 30 years ago was in fact superior in clarity to what I have now. And yes, I know - 30 years is a long time eyesight-wise, but mine is pretty good.

If this hadn’t been bought as a gift, I would have changed it some time ago. I couldn’t recommend Celestron products to any prospective purchasers.

P.S. The moon looks quite good, but then it does so through a pair of binoculars.

Date of experience: August 20, 2022

The technical support team went above and beyond to help me out.

For that I’m very grateful as they didn’t have to.

Their telescopes are absolutely awesome and I would recommend above all other makes in its class…

Date of experience: May 04, 2021

My first time dealing with Celestron and unfortunately a bad experience. I felt the information on their website relevant to our purchase was blatantly misleading.

My father wanted to surprise me with a telescope of my own. After much reading on their website, he decided to buy the Celestron TravelScope 70. That was a few months ago. Due COVID-19 lockdowns, I couldn't fly to visit my parents as originally intended, until recently. That is when I was surprised with a brand new telescope. I unpacked the package and "installed" the telescope. I tried observing a few objects with my father...

Optics-wise, the product works relatively okay. There is some aberration under some circumstances, but otherwise optics are perhaps surprisingly okay for such a minimal scope. The tripod is not usable. The finding scope ("cercatore") is also barely usable. The eyepieces (20mm and 10mm) are fairly alright. The focusing mechanism is relatively poor, but it's mostly because of the even poorer tripod that the drawbacks of the focusing mechanism are felt - a better tripod would make focusing much pleasanter even with the existing mechanism.

However... It is not the optics or even the equipment that make this a 2 star review (had that been all, this would have still been a 4 star review - considering the low price at which it is sold as I later found out).

What makes this a 2 star review is the misleading information on Celestron's website and in their user manual for this scope.

My dad, a complete beginner, believed the description on the site and was so looking forward to observing planets with me - perhaps his greatest dream. Celestron's website clearly states about this scope:

"The Travel Scope can view the planets, moon, star clusters and brighter deep sky objects like the Orion Nebula and Andromeda Galaxy at night..."

The user manual of this scope goes a big step further - on page 13 it has a section titled "Observing the planets". Under this title, the following text appears:

"You can see Venus go through its lunar-like phases. Mars can reveal a host of surface detail and one, if not both, of its polar caps. You may be able to see the cloud belts of Jupiter and the great Red
Spot (if it is visible at the time you are observing). In addition, you will also
be able to see the moons of Jupiter as they orbit the giant planet. Saturn,
with its beautiful rings, is visible at moderate power."

Reality however differs from these poetic descriptions very much. You can certainly not see planets with this scope (not to mention some of the other objects on their list). To make matters worse, Celestron even included a beautiful magnified picture of Jupiter in the manual - a sight you certainly cannot view with this scope. Same goes for an ultra-magnified moon view that surely couldn't have come from this scope kit. However - to be fair, you can get decent views of the moon with this scope (just not as magnified as the user manual portrays them). And probably also of the sun with appropriate filters. But you should be well informed that these are the main objects you can observe, other than terrestrial viewing.

I think Celestron should have made sure that the info on their website is much more accurate. To say that you can "observe planets with this telescope" (or some of the other objects on their list), is just as true as if I were to say that I can "observe planets" with the naked eye. Technically, yes, you can observe them with the naked eye. But it is unfair to market a product with language - and pictures! - that suggest that this product would deliver much improved views in comparison to the views of the naked eye. And it is certainly not an improvement on our average binoculars...

The fact that Celestron used such misleading information is bad enough with any kind of customer. However, especially seeing as this telescope is heavily marketed for beginners, who rarely have any clue about telescopes, I think Celestron should have taken extra care to stick with accurate information. They did not take extra care. It seems that they did not take any care at all, in fact, beginner or no beginner.

Especially when marketing to beginners... Today's beginners are tomorrow's avid astronomy fans who will always upgrade. Shame to leave such a bad impression from the start!

TLDR; optics are okay, definitely considering the price; information on Celestron's website is highly misleading though; make sure to read on independent third party websites prior to making any purchase. Personally, I would avoid making any purchase with such a company who uses misleading information as a form of marketing. It's a bad sign if you can't get sales by using honesty and accuracy in the info you give!

Date of experience: March 12, 2021

Bought a Celestron EdgeHD 8 and electronic focuser. Connected as per manual and focuser was struggling to turn despite following manual for not over tightening. It burnt out. I contacted the seller here in uk who were great and they replaced the focuser straight away. I also contacted Celestron for advise and got a “probably a duff unit” response. I Got another focuser and installed. This time i powered via USB only to play safe. The high current version of USB, Pegasus UPB high current port to ne precise. The focuser was still tight! Had to back screws of so far to get the original manual focuser smoothness that they became superfluous. in the end i had to make a 2mm shim to keep the focuser off the outer ring of the EdgeHD focus bearing. Note, everything was centred and aligned as per the user manual but no joy, only the shim helped. Well, heres the reason for the 2 star review, Celestron was contacted two weeks ago, I sent pictures and a detailed explanation. I got the stock auto response back that a rep will be in touch soon. That was two weeks ago. One week later i sent a chaser email and got no response al all. All in all pretty much destroys my confidence in Celstron, Pretty sad really!

Br and Good Luck with there Tech Support.

Date of experience: June 29, 2020

Date of experience: October 18, 2019