I bought the Celestron Astromaster 130eq Telescope as a beginner astronomer

I bought the astromaster 130eq Telescope as a beginner astronomer with interest in astrophotography, I have zero knowledge about both subjects, so I've been studying myself with any available info online. So finally I was brave enough to make the first step of buying equipment. As a first telescope this is great and worth every penny, the reason is that it has a very good aperture, hence the "130" (a more expensive telescope could have 60-70 more), so you get a very sharp and detailed image of any celestial body even with the wide angle eyepieces it comes with. About the eyepieces it comes with two (10 and 20 mm), the 20 mm is a wide angle one, the 10 mm is still wide, but can give you enough magnification to see details on the moon, Saturn's rings and moons as well Jupiter's surfaces details and moons. The advantage to start with wide angle eyepieces is to learn how to navigate and target an object of the sky. It's important to master these in order for you to be able to use a smaller mm eyepiece. The narrower the eyepiece is, the more the magnification will be. Don't worry as I said the 10 mm eyepiece will give enough detail to have a lot of fun with friends and family. 

The telescope also comes mounted on an equatorial mount (the EQ), which is the best mount to start to understand how the sky moves (the mount will literally help to follow the sky travel), once you get used to it, it will be very simple to navigate with it, the first couple of nights can be frustrating because of the mount, you just need to learn how to loosen the knobs of each coordinate, each coordinate comes with 2 knobs to do very small movement, this will allow you to set both coordinated in a very precise and delicate way, allowing you to track stars and planets movement. The mount also has weights on it, so it will be very stable, this will also allow you to mount the camera on top of your telescope, it also has a table to put your eyepieces underneath, there is also an option to attach a motor to the mount, so it will rotate the RA coordinate easing the tracking of the object (but not included in this model). 

Speaking of accessories for this telescope, there are several that will allow you to make your experience more professional and/or more entertaining, some, will allow you to connect a camera to the telescope (using it as a lens for the camera), there are also smaller mm eyepieces, or special filters like the barlow lens for planetary observation, special colour filters for each planet and the moon. So in summary I've chosen this Celestron telescope because of the fairly good price and you get a nice piece of equipment that will help to understand the advanced stuff and allow you to decide whether you want to go for the next level or not. Also, to be honest its looks very good too. Happy Sky hunting.

Review by Antonio F. Gagliardi Lugo