Celestron Powerseeker127

As i’d previously mentioned i came into ownership of this scope purely by chance. So now it’s time to review it’s performance. Firstly a word of caution for anyone who has never owned a telescope, there are better, cheaper, hasslefree telescopes out there for less money! These scopes with short optical tubes and long focal lengths are of the Bird/Jones variety. They are cheap to produce but not exactly user friendly. The way in which they achieve a long focal length in a short tube is by using a corrector/barlow lens in the focuser which makes collimation a little more involved compared with parabolic scopes without the corrector.. Sadly this scope is also usually shipped with the poor quality and slightly incapable EQ1 tripod. The reason for the sad performance is down to the scope being too heavy for the tripod. If the legs are left unextended the tripod can just cope without too much vibration/wobble. Next the OTA itself.

The OTA is quite light for it’s size dispite chunky cast aluminium mounts for both primary and secondary. At first glance the black hammered finish paint on the primary and secondary mounts along with the silver tube give an appearance of quality. The focuser has a metal ring and two bolts at the eyepiece end giving a further nod to quality.. how deceptive appearances can be 😦  The secondary holder has really thick light/contrast stealing vanes, an oversized secondary mirror with philips head screw adjustment. The Primary cell has the mirror mounted on foam rubber blocks with rubber compression grommets instead of springs for collimation. The collimation screws are again just philips head screws which speaks volumes of the cost cutting. the mirror used in these scopes is Spherical and not Parabolic which is part of the Bird/Jones design and again a sign of costcutting. The 25mm finder is… functional and probably the best quality part of this entire outfit. The focuser has more slop in every direction than some of the cheap plastic items supplied on scopes of half the price.

Performance wise, quite similar to my 102GT refractor but with less contrast. There is spherical aberration around 10% of the field at high magnification. probably a result of the corrector not being up to the job. In the centre of the field the stars are reasonably sharp but not refractor sharp! There appears to be a little more light gathered with the 127 but the lack of contrast makes any performance increase over the 4″ refractor a bit of a moot point as the image isn’t as clear. What can be seen is again very similar to the 4″ refractor. Jupiter looks good up to 150x Magnification but at 200x becomes a little less detailed and slightly fuzzy. Epsilon Lyrae (the double double) gives a good comparison, in the 4″ the stars are pinpoint and the separation line is distinct and clearly darker than in the 127. The 127 shows the stars as less pinpoint and the sky background is slightly brighter giving a feel of less contrast. The comparison was made using the same eyepiece with the refractor using a cheap erecting diagonal.

All things considered the 127 is cheaper but allows the same performance as the 4″ refractor at half the cost. A 130mm parabolic newt can be had for around the same price as the 127 which makes the 127 less of a bargain. The only upside is the 1000mm focal length and short tube which give greater magnification and portability respectively. Personally i much prefer the refractor. i paid £150 for the refractor including the goto mount secondhand which is the cost of the 127 new, but would i pay £150 for the 127 should i ever need a replacement? the simple answer is no! considering the better offerings around this pricepoint either new or secondhand, i really couldn’t recommend this scope. The 130P comes with thumbscrews for collimation but still the same poor EQ mount, maybe a 90 or 102mm Maksutov would be better for people looking for portability. whichever way the Celestron Powerseeker127 will provide reasonable views of the most popular astronomical targets and may be value for money in some peoples eyes, but i just can’t bring myself to recommend it.

Celestron Powerseeker 127 Newtonian

A long time back i came into posession of the titled item. It was purely by chance as a friend had overheard me talking about telescopes. I was completely unaware that he also owned a scope, but for good reasons he’d never mentioned his ownership of the powerseeker.

After a brief conversation it transpired that he’d bought the offending item from ebay, unseen and unwarranted the scope that would prove to be a nightmare came into his posession with more than a few problems. The equipment supplied consisted of a finder with blurred objective (some sort of grease) along with an EQ1 tripod and a single 6mm eyepiece. Any of the more experienced among you will straight away see the problems he faced with a focal length of 1000mm and a 6mm EP! In simple terms he’d tried it a few times and said he couldn’t even find the moon!

That was only the start! Removing the dust cap revealed a primary that had a speckled appearance..? My first question was, “how much did you pay for this?”,” 20 quid” was his reply… good job as it looked like the primary was done for. we removed the primary and the mottling looked like paint splatter, a LOT of paint splatter! time to see what will remove it…

Isopropol alcohol didn’t touch it… next for solvent! a few sites had mentioned acetone so i suggested diluted acetone until we had a strength that worked. it turned out that a 50/50 acetone/warm water mix started to have an effect. we left the primary soaking in a bowl for an hour or so which removed around 80% of the offending material. One problem became apparent.. whatever the material was it had “etched” itself onto the mirror. each cleaned section revealed a perfect mirrored finish with small almost matte spots where the material had been.

After a full clean the scope was rebuilt and just looking down the tube it was obvious the primary was done for. Another trip around ebay secured a second Powerseeker 127 with a good mirror for the princely sum of £30. When the second scope arrived we rebuilt one good scope with the best bits from the pair. Collimated it gave reasonable views and my friend went away happy.

A few months later our paths crossed again and i asked how the scope was.. he promptly asked me if i wanted it! Now if it had been a refractor i’d have jumped at it, but my past run in with the 8″ Dob had kind of put me off newtonian ownership. I asked why he wanted rid of it and it turned out he couldn’t get it collimated. I agreed to collimate it for him which i did, but when i told him to collect it he said i should keep it for free… he’d had enough of it. The following evening he dropped off the eyepieces that had come with the scope and the EQ1 mount/tripod. He had made £40 back on the original scope and mount and wasn’t bothered about losing £10 on this scope. I offered him a refractor in exchange but he refused.

So here i am with the 127 that i’ve had stored in my garage since the middle of last year. I prefer my 102GT as there’s no cooldown, collimation etc and it’s ready to go almost instantly, But… another friend who has telescopes asked if he could borrow it. I returned in a sorry state which has taken a week of sorting. The good news is that it now performs like it should, the bad news is that after all the tinkering i find myself wanting something else to tinker with 🙂 I’ll pop a review in my telescopes section of the 127 in all it’s glory.