Celestron 22403 Inspire 100AZ Refractor Smartphone Adapter Built-In Refracting Telescope - Blue

Product Information

barrel size, and the higher magnification of the 32mm means a bit more contrast under light-polluted skies with the Inspire 100AZ due to the smaller exit pupil. This combination gives you the ability to scan the sky and get great views of each different kind of celestial body. Although we were able to achieve focus perfectly adequately, the single-speed rack and pinion focuser is the Inspire 100AZ’s weak point. It's an impressive piece of design and relatively easy to use, though it does help enormously if you have a spare 20 mm eyepiece to leave in place.

However, the “micrometre” is tiny, positioned on the side of the telescope, and not illuminated in any way, so it is a functionally useless decoration. While it doesn’t eliminate the effects of light pollution altogether and only works on some objects, it enhances the contrast on nebulae, making them appear more luminous against the background and revealing subtle details. This versus guide puts the two head-to-head to help you decide which mid-range, intermediate model will be the best telescope for your needs. The Inspire, by Celestron, is a refractor telescope that bills itself as the perfect fit for the beginner stargazer. Celestron actually sells a pretty nice prism star diagonal, which they include with their higher-end telescopes by default.The Celestron Inspire 100AZ is essentially a short practice telescope of fairly standard optical quality but with a decent build and some unique extra features.

The Inspire 100AZ comes with a 10mm Kellner eyepiece providing 66x, but it can handle a fair bit more magnification than that—up to about 200x. Although this telescope and its non-motorised mount are not designed with astrophotography in mind, the Inspire 100AZ’s dust cap has a novel feature – you can strap a smartphone to it and then attach the pairing to one of the two eyepieces that come with the scope. Under skies like these, open star clusters explode into colorful gobs of stars straddled by dark dust lanes. Manually locating and then fixing on to much dimmer, harder to find objects is a challenge when using the Celestron Inspire 100AZ. Although your smartphone camera already has a lens and therefore can’t be used at prime focus, light collected by the telescope can be projected into your phone’s camera by an eyepiece in a process known as afocal photography.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.