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Celestron PowerSeeker 114EQ Review – Not Recommended

Celestron’s PowerSeeker 114EQ, like all of its siblings in the PowerSeeker line, are unusable scopes which I don’t recommend to beginners. However, the 114EQ is a little better than the other PowerSeekers.

Celestron’s PowerSeeker 114EQ is actually a great telescope, but the devil is in the details.

It’s paired with a mount that cannot possibly hold it and accessories that are little more than decorations due to their absurdly low quality. I was hard-pressed to get this telescope aimed at anything, let alone see anything with it. However, once I replaced all the accessories and stuck it on a Dobsonian mount, I had a surprisingly decent instrument with great views.

How It Stacks Up

Ranks #24 of 31 (£150 Range Telescope)

Rank 24
Celestron PowerSeeker 114EQ
2.3
What We Like

  • Good optics
  • Mount works well at low power


What We Don't Like

  • Mount is shaky at high power
  • More expensive than tabletop Dobsonians and nowhere near as usable out of the box
  • Included eyepieces, Barlow, and finderscope are bad


Bottom Line

The Celestron PowerSeeker 114EQ provides a tube for a good telescope – but isn’t one in itself, so stay far, far away from buying one new.

Primary Optics: Spherical, But Still Great

The Celestron PowerSeeker 114EQ is a standard 114mm f/8 Newtonian with a spherical primary mirror, not the superior parabolic mirror. But at this aperture and focal length, a spherical mirror provides images that are well within the tolerances of a typical parabolic mirror while being extremely easy and cheap to manufacture.

These scopes have been around for decades. When used with quality eyepieces, they provide great images with little in the way of the coma that plagues faster focal ratio telescopes.

I used an identical 114mm f/8 (an older Celestron, made in the same factory on the same assembly line but on a steadier mount) to watch the 2016 transit of Mercury with a solar filter. It performed admirably. I’ve also briefly owned another one and was able to resolve some very tiny craterlets inside the lunar crater Clavius.

114EQ's powerseeker optical tube's focuser, tube ring and collimation screws
The 114EQ has a 1.25” rack-and-pinion focuser and comes with a pair of tube rings for attaching it to the mount, which allows us to slide and rotate the tube as needed for balance as well as put the eyepiece in a convenient and comfortable location.

Thanks to the long focal ratio of the telescope, collimating it is quite easy, if not bordering on trivial.

The Bad Set of Accessories

The accessories included with the Celestron PowerSeeker 114EQ are, like all PowerSeeker accessories, atrocious. I’m warning you: not one of these has anything resembling quality.

3x barlow lens, finderscope, 20mm eyepiece and 4mm eyepiece
We get a 20mm eyepiece, a 4mm eyepiece, a 3x Barlow lens, and a 5×24 finderscope.

The included 20mm eyepiece, providing 45x with the Celestron PowerSeeker 114EQ, is supposedly a Kellner. But it has an erecting prism in it to flip the image right-side up so that we can view birds with this massive and wobbly Newtonian reflector on an equatorial mount. I see that this is actually why Celestron includes it—to market it as usable for terrestrial applications. As a side effect, this prism massively reduces sharpness, sucks up a good portion of the light entering the eyepiece, and reduces the apparent field of view to around 30 degrees, which makes using it feel like I’m looking through a soda straw.

The PowerSeeker 4mm Ramsden eyepiece also has the soda straw experience, with the bonus of providing too much magnification to be actually useful (225x) and also requiring jamming my eyeball up to the tiny lens to see anything through it (which isn’t much, trust me).

The 3x Barlow included with all PowerSeeker telescopes is made out of plastic, completely useless, and exists purely so that Celestron can advertise the telescopes as capable of over 600x magnification. It serves as a purely marketing bogus. No telescope is capable of such high magnification powers on a consistent basis, especially not a small and wobbly beginner instrument. You can use it as a spare lens cap or throw it in the garbage, like I did.

Lastly, the PowerSeekers come with a plastic 5×24 finderscope to aim the telescope. Not only does this finder have poor optics and a slide-tube focusing mechanism that is almost impossible to adjust correctly, but it doesn’t fit in the bracket well and basically doesn’t ever stay aligned with the telescope. You would be best off unscrewing the lenses from the finder and sighting through the empty tube. Seriously.

The Shaky EQ1 Mount

The EQ1 isn’t actually terrible. The EQ1 is made out of a mix of aluminium and plastic and does just fine holding a small telescope or a DSLR and lens.

EQ1 mount and the tripod legs
Equatorial Mount

However, the 114EQ optical tube is not exactly small and therefore the tube can’t be balanced properly on the mount.

Whenever I use it, I’m constantly fumbling with the telescope crashing into the mount, it moving on its own accord the instant I let go of it, or even literally toppling over to the ground.

Coupled with the insanely bad finderscope and the unusable eyepieces provided with the telescope, I’d advise you against having high hopes of seeing anything with this telescope. Getting it pointed at the Moon would be a massive success.

Should I buy a Used Celestron PowerSeeker 114EQ?

If you’re willing to do some DIY and find a PowerSeeker 114EQ for under £50 or so, you could build a Dobsonian mount for it, equip it with a good finder and eyepieces, and be rewarded with some surprisingly good views. Otherwise, don’t bother.

Alternative Recommendations

Pretty much any telescope with good optics, a stable mounting, and useful accessories would be an upgrade over the PowerSeeker line, but here are a few of our top picks in its price range:

  • The Zhumell Z114 offers the same aperture as the 114EQ, but with a wider field of view, better eyepieces, and a rock-solid and easy-to-use tabletop Dobsonian mount to boot.
  • For a bit less money, the Zhumell Z100 and Sky-Watcher Heritage 100P have a bit less aperture than the PowerSeeker 114EQ, but are a lot easier to use and have decent accessories provided.

Aftermarket Accessory Recommendations

Despite the expense, which could naturally be directed towards upgrading to a superior telescope, high-quality aftermarket eyepieces can be used with another telescope later on and will at least make the observational experience with your PowerSeeker 114EQ somewhat enjoyable, even with its unsteady mounting. The 114EQ’s provided 20mm erecting eyepiece is dreadful and entirely ruins any low-power viewing, where the telescope can still work well despite its instability. A good low-power eyepiece to replace it is a must. Our choice would be a 32mm Plossl (28x), which is far sharper than the 20mm erecting eyepiece and offers the widest practical field of view with the PowerSeeker 114EQ, making it ideal for observing deep-sky objects. A 15mm redline/goldline eyepiece (60x) should work fairly well, while the 9mm version (100x) is ideal for planetary viewing with the 114EQ but is unlikely to be fun thanks to the instability of the telescope’s undersized mount. 

An amateur astronomer and telescope maker from Connecticut who has been featured on TIME Magazine, National Geographic, Sky & Telescope, La Vanguardia, and The Guardian.

1 thought on “Celestron PowerSeeker 114EQ Review – Not Recommended”

  1. Zane,
    As always, you folks deliver a great review. I don’t buy anything before consulting your site.
    I read a review of this scope on Cloudy Nights, from 2013, and he said the same thing… good OTA to make into a dob, and the mount/tripod better suited for a lighter scope. I’m bidding on Shop Goodwill for it now, for next to nothing. It would be nice to have it for outreach, or for one of my local libraries to lend out.
    Again, thanks very much for your knowledge and honesty that you share with all of us.
    Hope that you and your family enjoy the holidays, and a happy and healthy new year!
    All the best,
    Michael

    Reply

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