Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ review

The Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ is a pretty good telescope if your situation calls for a tripod-mounted instrument. If you’ve decided a tripod-mounted, smartphone-guided telescope fits your needs, it’s a solid buy. Just be sure to consider the various Dobsonian alternatives first, as well as fully motorized GoTo options if those appeal to you more than a manual telescope.

StarSense phone dock makes finding objects easy without motors

Can be used as a fully manual telescope, with or without phone/StarSense

Small aperture and wide field make some deep-sky objects hard to track down

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The Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ is a 5.1-inch (130mm) f/5 Newtonian reflector, one of many 130mm f/5 reflectors offered by Celestron. The DX 130AZ is also one of two 130mm StarSense Explorer variants, the other being a tabletop Dobsonian. The optical tube here rides on an alt-azimuth tripod instead and uses a 2-inch focuser, but otherwise, there are no major differences.

The DX 130 AZ is certainly one of the better telescopes in the StarSense Explorer series; there are also several decent Dobsonians, a pair of decent Schmidt-Cassegrains, the merely acceptable DX 102 refractor, a 114mm Bird-Jones model and some small refractors that aren’t of much use.

The DX 130AZ is definitely on the small end of what can be called a "serious" instrument, but even under a fairly light-polluted sky, it’s big enough to show you plenty of deep-sky objects and, of course, stunning detail on the moon and planets.