Home > Consumer Reviews > Celestron 21045 114mm Equatorial PowerSeeker Telescope

I am an astronomer on a budget and as I was doing my search, I was advised to buy as much aperture as I can. I decided to get this Powerseeker 114 as it looked like a great value. Because of it's attractive price, I was a bit skeptical. However, when I received the scope, I really liked how much telescope I got, for what I paid. It had everything I needed in a telescope, decent sized aperture, equatorial mount to track celestial movements, 2 eyepieces for low and high magnification and a decent tripod. I certainly got more than I expected. With the 4.5" aperture, I was able to see nice details on the lunar surface, Jupiter and it's moons, Saturn and Mars as well as the Orion nebula. If you are a budding astronomer and you want to get started, you will be happy with this model.

I had a chance to use this telescope at a friends house and I was impressed at everything that came with the telescope especially after he told me what he paid for it. First of all, it came with a 4.5" reflector and as a rule, aperture rules. A 4.5" telescope can deliver good planetary images and faint deep sky objects. When I first looked it over, it was a little shaky but I discovered that he did not tighten properly. After going through and tightening the screws and bolts, it was ready for use. The included eyepiece 20mm was great at 45x and with the use of the 3x barlow produced 225x. 225x I feel is too much. 225x is too much for most scopes and sky conditions.

With the 20mm 45x eyepiece, I can clearly see Jupiter with its moons and Mars with its ice cap. I highly recommend getting the accessory kits so that you can get various magnifications and get more visual detail.

The equatorial mount was a bonus as it made tracking the celestial and planetary objects easier. Once you have used a telescope, you will clearly see that having an equatorial mount is so useful.

This is a good starter scope for someone who wants more of an astronomical telescope. You get a lot of scope, brighter images than smaller 60mm scopes for not a lot of money.

While the optics of this scope are good, there are quite a few bad things about this telescope. The tripod is shaky, unstable and cheaply produced. The finder scope is flimsy and almost unusable.

The users manual that comes with this scope is not written for beginners. Important topics such as balancing the telescope, polar alignment and collimation (aligning the mirrors) are glossed over and totally unsuitable for a beginner.

I would recommend spending the extra money to buy an Orion Spaceprobe 3 or SPaceprobe 130.

My recent Christmas experience with the Celestron Powerseeker 114EQ, my first "real" telescope, was a great disappointment. The assembled telescope looked very impressive but functioned poorly. It came without a detailed instruction manual making it difficult to set up, balance, and aim even for a mechanically inclined novice. The plastic finderscope was very cheap, blurry, and hard to align with the main scope. The "equatorial" (EQ) mount knobs moved the scope with jerky motions at times and the scope itself seemed a bit vibration prone on its tripod. Stellar images were blurry and unimpressive (possibly due to mirror misalignment in shipping and/or manufacturing defect) thus other individual scopes may do better than mine in this category. Newtonian reflector type telescope mirrors go out of alignment ("collimation") fairly easily and this scope came without instructions for how to realign them. I returned the telescope within the 30 day refund period and am looking for a better quality and sturdier one like the highly praised Orion Skyquest series or possibly the smaller and more portable Edmund Scientific Astroscan.

I bought this scope as a b-day gift for my hubby who has never owned a telescope before. It was fairly simple to put together, and we found the directions to be very helpful and accurate.
We first tried to view the moon. The finder was a little tricky and it took us about 30 minutes to get the moon aligned so we could really see all the details. It produced a very crisp image with lots of detail. We have been able to view constellations and a few planets also with this telescope and have been impressed with the clarity of the images. It seems there is a learning curve with the eye pieces and finder. Once you get used to it you can find what you are looking for pretty quickly though.
This telescope is not a professional grade scope, and for someone who has used telescopes before or has owned one it may not be enough scope for them.
We have found it to be very sturdy and were very happy that it came with lots of extras other telescopes in this price range leave out. The software helped us out a lot, and just having an accessory tray to put extra pieces on while viewing is a nice bonus.
For a first time telescope this one is great! I'm very impressed by the quality I got for what I paid.