Why the StarSense Explorer LT 114AZ is perfect for a novice hobby astronomer

I recently bought the Celestron StarSense Explorer LT 114AZ, as I was really intrigued by being able to use a smartphone to guide me as a fairly novice hobby astronomer through the night sky. As with every new technology I was at first sceptic but… This actually works amazingly well. With no prior experience of the night sky and celestial objects you can take this telescope out, set up your phone and just like that, you are looking at the moon, star systems and various planets! This while also knowing what you are looking at thanks to the Starsense app. As I have had quite bad luck with the weather with Sweden, I have not been able to try it out with deep space objects, so I cannot comment on that, but based on the size of the telescope, it should be able on a day with clear skies. 

The telescope itself is exactly what you can expect from a Newtonian 114 reflector telescope from Celestron. Good build quality, very light (just under 5 kg or 10.4 lbs.) so it's easy to carry around. The tripod is in what I think is steel and for this price, this is a very good tripod, I have seen worse in this price range. For accessories, in the box you receive a decent 2X Barrow lens, a better than expected red dot finder scope that can be used to manually focus on objects when you are not using the phone. For the eyepieces, you receive 2 decent entry level eyepieces (10 mm & 25 mm). Here I would suggest buying a separate 15 mm eyepiece to cover the area in-between once you have some more experience. You also receive an accessory tray for the tripod mount where you can house the accessories.

Setting up the telescope for the first time is very easy and should not take more than 10 mins. You receive a very clear instruction manual that you can follow, but if you rather like visual guidance, there is an excellent 2-min setup video on YouTube provided by Celestron. Once it's setup, download the app, enter the code you receive in the box into the app and follow the instructions. 

To summarize, if you are looking into getting into astronomy and want to buy something equipped with the latest technology and is slightly above entry-level telescopesin terms of what you get in a similar price range, I would gladly recommend StarSense Explorer LT 114AZ to anyone, novice or more experienced.

Review by Robert N