Celestron 31036 AstroMaster LT 76AZ Telescope, Black

Is really good for beginning but is a bit bad for been stainable

Used for Stargazing. Easy to assemble. Light piece of kit.

We enjoyed our first use of the telescope tonight. Easy to see the craters on the big full moon.

Got it for a coworker who bought it for his friend. He said she loves it.

The Celestron Astromaster 70AZ.

Nice telescope 70mm lens, 2 x eyepieces a 10mm and a 20mm a star finder light and the 90 fitting to use for the eyepieces. The tripod isn’t bad either… it has a tray for your eyepieces and bits.

We bought ours to view the rings of Saturn and you can see them quite clearly but the image was small, as you might expect from a budget priced telescope. We could also see Jupiter although a bit blurry although it’s many moons were quite clear next to it.

Overall the 70AZ is not a bad telescope for a beginner like us but we had some misgivings with the telescope itself.

On our telescope, (they may not all be like this) but the rotating wheels axel unit attached to the base to adjust the focus was skewiff while mounted on the tripod which made it look odd, there was no way of straightening this, it was like as if the person who assembled it didn’t make sure it was straight before they glued and rivited the end mechanism onto the tube. There was also some very sticky lubrication grease which we got on our hands from the inner chrome focusing tube (we think) and had to use methylated spirit to get it off our hands in the early hours of the morning after viewing Jupiter and Saturn for the first time. The metal ring on the end of the telescope was loose and wouldn’t stay put while removing the dust cover, there wasn’t even any way of securing it, so there were a few issues we had with it sorry.

If you don’t have the floor space to keep this sort of telescope on it’s tripod, this may not be the type tou want taking up room.

Unfortunately we sent the whole thing back, we may get an equivalent at a later date because we did enjoy using this briefly but as soon as we decided to return it we packed it all back up in it’s box ready to go back.

Remember that no two 70AZ identical telescopes will be the same but this was our experience, don’t let us put you off.

We hope our information helps, thankyou for reading.

I got this telescope for my birthday as I have always been interested in astronomy, however, we had a cheap supermarket telescope when I was younger, which put my parents and me off from telescopes at the time. This AstroMaster Refractor is a great starter telescope in my opinion mainly because of it’s ease of use. However, I would say that it is most suited for looking at the moon. I saw Jupiter and it’s four moons, which was a great experience, however, it is quite difficult to keep track of Jupiter given it’s movement across the nightsky and the telescope’s handle. I also had difficulties using the finder scope, but that is mainly due to me being as good as blind ;). I would recommend using free mobile apps like SkyView Lite. These are great tools to find your way around the nightsky. Overall, this telescope is great. It is durable and of good quality, but most importantly it is a lot of fun using it to look at the stars. Highly recommended!

I bought both the 50AZ and 70AZ and they are worlds apart! The 70AZ has a very useable tripod and the Eyepieces are of good enough quality for starters. Obviously using more expensive/better quality eyepieces will improve performance. my only gripe with the telescope i recieved was some of the polystyrene packaging(a few specks) had got inside the tube either during packing or delivery. i shook them out without much dificulty.

Performance wise the telescope is good, the red dot finder is reasonably easy to set up, but when looking at objects overhead you have to get right under it which needs some contortions at times. i would recommend this scope to starters, it’s light weight and reasonable construction make it worth the 65.00 spent. The 50AZ was 40 cheaper but absolutely useless, i wrote a review about it, but in summary i was deeply saddened by celestrons decision to let the 50AZ be marketed under their name. especially as their other products of 60mm and upwards are all good budget kit.

Dont believe all you may read on other sites telling you that you need a big reflector telescope to see anything. these long focal length refractors are virtually CA free (chromatic aberation) and give good views for beginners. the whole myth of poor optics on small refractors comes from cheap telescopes like the 50AZ and other toyshop telescopes.

This is a fantastic beginners refractor telescope. I bought this for my sons 8th birthday earlier this year. Unfortunately we just missed out on the clear skies we had in March with the Jupiter Venus conjunction. That said we’ve had a few clear skies since then to get good use out of the scope where we have seen some fabulous views of the moon, Jupiter, Venus & Saturn.

I would highly recommend an additional purchase of the Celestron eyepiece set to use with this scope. The refractor comes with two eyepieces, a 20mm & 10mm. The 20mm is ok but the 10mm in my opinion is a poor eyepiece. Since purchasing the eyepiece set I don’t think I have bothered with either of the two included eyepieces as the set one’s are far better quality (in particular the 32mm eyepiece). Getting back to the telescope I was impressed with the build quality of both the tripod and scope. The tripod is an Alt-Azimuth. At first I regretted not getting an equatorial mount for the scope which is recommended over the Alt-Azimuth for astronomy. I’m not so bothered about it now as I find the tripod very easy to set up which means I can get it out of the house and into the garden quickly. My son has also used the scope for spotting on the seafront which an Alt-Azimuth is recommended for so you now have more than one use for the telescope. Perhaps in the future we may purchase an equatorial mount when it’s time to upgrade but this suits us perfectly for now.

The scope has a dove tail mount for the tripod, I noticed some reviewers complain about the scope wobbling at the mount which I have also experienced but I got round this by taking my time carefully mounting the scope to the tripod. Once done you don’t really need to do this again as I tend to put the telescope away by removing the tray and collapsing the tripod legs rather than removing the scope from the tripod.

With the stock 20mm eyepiece you will see Jupiter and it’s four largest moons, the phases of Venus, Saturn with it’s rings visible and as expected with most telescopes very clear close up images of the moon. I think this is excellent for what is a sub 100 telescope.

There are of course things not to like at this price range. I’ve already commented on what I think about the stock eyepieces. My only other gripe is with the diagonal which has a cheap plastic feel to it. It’s perfectly functional but I found over time it loosened with the screws not doing a good job of holding it tightly to the back of the scope. I ended up replacing this for a better quality celestron diagonal which cost about 25. Money well spent.

Hopefully you can see an image I have attached of the moon taken with a compact camera mounted to this telescope via a 32mm eyepiece. Definitely recommend upgrading your eyepieces, that said at less than 100 this is the scope to get and perfect for starting out in Astronomy.

Update – 19-Sep-2012 :-

Just like to add that I recently purchased a Telrad red dot finder to use with this telescope which I’m very glad I did as it helped me locate the Andromeda Galaxy last night! Seeing conditions were as good as they get with no moon but still some light pollution what with living 35 miles outside of London and near an airport. People who say that this scope is limited to just solar objects are wrong! You can use this for viewing Deep Sky Objects (DSO) as well. Ok Andromeda was just a faint grey smudge but I still managed to locate it with this telescope using the stock 20mm eyepiece. Simply amazing!