Turn on “Save Images & Logs” from the Menu as described above. After you use StarSense Explorer at night, there will be images and log files stored on your phone. Accessing them requires connecting your smartphone to a computer. To retrieve the files: The Celestron Inspire 100AZ's achromatic doublet lens is fully coated. It’s only a thin coating, but it’s evenly applied with no bad spots. Refractors have been in use for centuries, the original design came from Galileo Galilei in the 1600s. With the Inspire 100AZ, it’s easy to see Saturn’s rings, the Cassini Division inside them, and a few cloud bands on the planet itself, though they aren’t very colorful and just look like symmetrical stripes. A few of Saturn’s moons can also be seen, with Titan being the brightest among them. Rhea, Tethys, and Dione are easy to spot; Enceladus and Iapetus are tougher. Unleash the power of your smartphone to take you on a guided tour of the night sky—no telescope experience required.

But if you can take the telescope to an even slightly darker location, more objects will become visible. With this 4” refractor and relatively dark skies, the Andromeda Galaxy, Hercules Open Star Cluster, and so many more are easily within your reach.

Share this article

The Celestron Inspire 100AZ gave us early evening views of Venus, where the planet’s phase was easily observed and Mars was very clearly a non-stellar red disc. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad device, it does have its pros such as a sturdy build, lower maintenance requirements, its ability to act kind of like a spotting scope but, unless you can find it at a discounted price or if you’re buying it for a child who is a little clumsy, I’d personally recommend giving this system a miss. The Inspire 100AZ includes two standard, interchangeable 1.25” eyepieces: a 20mm Kellner providing 33x magnification and a 10mm Kellner providing 66x magnification. These are all-plastic in construction (the lenses are, thankfully, glass) and will work well. You’ll probably want additional eyepieces to get the most out of this telescope, however—both at the low power end for wide-field vistas of deep-sky objects and at the high power end for viewing the Moon and planets. I personally would not recommend buying the Inspire 100AZ if you’re serious about astronomy and want to get the most out of your money.

There’s nothing groundbreaking about the night sky views with this telescope but you will be able to see detail on the Moon and see the rings of Saturn. It's a great 'grab and go' scope that doesn't require any complex setup. Something you can take to the park for birdwatching or leave on the windowsill for nature or plane spotting. The Inspire 100AZ uses an achromatic refractor lens, which is fully coated meaning it’ll be able to provide a crisp and detailed view of space whilst decreasing issues with aberration , provided you don’t go beyond it’s capabilities but, it also has a few shortcoming due to how the achromatic lens is designed. Red LED flashlight - Stowed in the center of the mount head, the flashlight can be used to gently illuminate the accessory tray or can be removed for use as a spotlight when needed. The extra magnification of your eyepiece will help you to take great photos of whatever it is you are observing, whether that is the the Moon and the Planets or anything on the ground if you are using it for terrestrial purposes (e.g. Wildlife). To fit the adapter, all you need to do is fit it on top of one of the eyepieces (instructions on how to do this are included in the box) and attaching the bungee cords. Your smartphone will then be held firmly in position. Celestron provide a comprehensive set of accessories to use with this scope. The following come included in the box:Galaxies, nebulaes, star clusters and large parts of the messier should be viewable although there may be issues showing accurate colours with some stars. The finder included with the Inspire 100AZ is Celestron’s “StarPointer Pro” red dot finder. Advertised as an improvement over Celestron’s standard “StarPointer” (itself a generic red dot finder like the kind sold with many beginner telescopes), the StarPointer Pro is basically a failed attempt to copy the Telrad. It has two circles instead of a dot in the middle, both of which are exceedingly wide. It is somewhat hard to actually centre anything in the finder, or align it precisely, or keep it aligned with the telescope particularly well. However, for a telescope with a fairly short focal length and a consequently wide field of view, like the Inspire 100AZ, it works well enough to get targets in the field of view most of the time. But if you’re hunting for faint fuzzies that you might not recognise at first glance, we might recommend replacing the StarPointer. If you received a red dot finderscope that looks like the unit pictured here, follow the instructions below to replace the battery: The 1.25” star diagonal included with the Inspire 100AZ is also mostly plastic, and the design is an Amici erecting prism, which provides correct images both left-right and up-down. Unless you plan on frequently reading signs and snooping on people’s reading material from a distance, this feature is essentially worthless and comes at a cost, too. Due to the way it works, any Amici erecting prism produces annoying bright spikes, glare, and additional chromatic aberration on bright targets – which doesn’t help when there are already glare issues with the dew shield and chromatic aberration from the objective lens itself to begin with.