Welcome • User Guide
ToS • Privacy • Canary
Donate • Bugs • License

©2025 Poal.co

163

Bought a $650 telescope for our son 6 years ago. For 6 months, could not get it to "align." (Short version... teach it where it is relative to the sky so it can find and track just about anything.) Contacted their tech support 6 times, complaining about the same thing, and always getting the same reply... "It's hard to do alignments. Keep practicing. You'll get it."

For 6 months, using a few of their tips and suggestions, and a few from a few forums, we: Bought a new power supply "just to rule it out." Bought an eyepiece with a reticle - they don't recommend using either of the 2 eyepieces that came with it to do alignments. Bought 2 different Barlow lenses (2x and 3x magnifier lenses) to make it more accurate for alignments. Bought a dovetail adapter to hold a level to confirm the built-in level is accurate. Bought 2 different collimators (laser aligning tool to make sure everything is square to itself.) Camera adapter, camera. Cell phone holder and adapter. Stabalizing pads to keep it steady. Balanced it to within 6 oz to keep it from drifting upward, with balance marks for the various combinations of lenses and adapters... I have balance marks on the tube and had to find the exact centerline of rotation of the mount so the balance marks on the tube line up on the mount. Countless hours practicing with almost zero success.

After 6 months, I'm convinced there is something wrong mechanically. (Actually, I was convinced when I had to balance the tube, because it moves up and down so easily that you can't use it without balancing it first, but that was back when I believed their tech support was trying to help. But I digress.) After 6 months of not working, I finally decided to look inside. Not sure what I'll find, I doubt there's a big red button that says "push here to fix it" or a little dude with a sliderule who needs new glasses... but who knows. The back cover of the thing is held on by 2 screws that are surprisingly loose. The back comes off, and inside I see (among all the wires and motors and shit) a nut on a threaded shaft... the pivot for the up-and-down movement... and the nut is loose. Almost tightened down against the bearing, but sloppy loose. It's letting the moving part of the mount sag and flop around as it rotates.

There it is. The root cause. I snugged it up finger tight, and immediately was able to align the stupid thing. Told Celestron. A few nights later, the nut is loose again. It sits right against the bearing, so every time it moves 'up,' it loosens it a little. "Celestron? How tight should I make this nut to keep it from loosening every time the tube moves up and down?" "You shouldn't adjust that. Alignments are hard. Keep practicing."

Now, 6 years later, after lots of hand-tightening every time we get it out, which is about once a year at this point, I decide to ask on an astronomy forum about how tight the nut should be. I figure maybe if it wasn't such a pain in the ass to use, I might get it out more often. I had tried tightening it up with a wrench a few years ago, just a little past finger-tight, and it became almost impossible to move the tube. (It's on a slip clutch, so you can move it by hand without using the sope's motors.) I figured a lock nut ("Nylock") would be a good way to set it and forget it, so went searching for maybe a torque spec or known method to prevent it coming unscrewed. One forum asked for a picture of the nut in question, and immediately they wnt nuts... the bearing wasn't seated fully or correctly, and was at a slight angle.

I went back to Celestron. "Here's the problem. It wasn't assembled correctly. How do I get a new bearing... and probably drive gears too after years of using misaligned hardware?" I'm thinking I have the original emails from 6 years ago, which in hindsight point to exactly this as the problem, so the least they could do is say "oops our bad let us fix it for you cuz we're cool like that kthxbai." However, it only had a 2-year warranty. "Oh, you need a new motor and control board. $200 if we ship the parts to you."

I decided to try forcing the bearing in straight, just to see if it's able to. It's in an aluminum frame, the pivot rod is only 1/4" diameter, hanging a 3-foot tube with a 5-inch glass mirror on it for 6 years may have squished the bearing into the aluminum. It had, a little. I was able to get it in straight(er) but couldn't put enough force on it to drive it home. Their bearing is pretty flimsy, I don't know why the FUCK they didn't use something even slightly stonger. But anyway. Put it back together, balanced it, powered it up...

"Communication error with drive unit." New hand controller: $120.

tldr Spent $650 on a telescope that as it turns out was assembled wrong, so it wouldn't work right. Celestron says it's a 'practice' issue after purchasing a few hundred dollers in shit to rule out various probable causes. Didn't find out the assembly problem until after 6 years. It's not longer under warranty, so $200 for parts so === I === can fix it at home. And now the hand controller isn't working right.

Fuck them.

Bought a $650 telescope for our son 6 years ago. For 6 months, could not get it to "align." (Short version... teach it where it is relative to the sky so it can find and track just about anything.) Contacted their tech support 6 times, complaining about the same thing, and always getting the same reply... "It's hard to do alignments. Keep practicing. You'll get it." For 6 months, using a few of their tips and suggestions, and a few from a few forums, we: Bought a new power supply "just to rule it out." Bought an eyepiece with a reticle - they don't recommend using either of the 2 eyepieces that came with it to do alignments. Bought 2 different Barlow lenses (2x and 3x magnifier lenses) to make it more accurate for alignments. Bought a dovetail adapter to hold a level to confirm the built-in level is accurate. Bought 2 different collimators (laser aligning tool to make sure everything is square to itself.) Camera adapter, camera. Cell phone holder and adapter. Stabalizing pads to keep it steady. Balanced it to within 6 oz to keep it from drifting upward, with balance marks for the various combinations of lenses and adapters... I have balance marks on the tube and had to find the exact centerline of rotation of the mount so the balance marks on the tube line up on the mount. Countless hours practicing with almost zero success. After 6 months, I'm convinced there is something wrong mechanically. (Actually, I was convinced when I had to balance the tube, because it moves up and down so easily that you can't use it *without* balancing it first, but that was back when I believed their tech support was trying to help. But I digress.) After 6 months of not working, I finally decided to look inside. Not sure what I'll find, I doubt there's a big red button that says "push here to fix it" or a little dude with a sliderule who needs new glasses... but who knows. The back cover of the thing is held on by 2 screws that are surprisingly loose. The back comes off, and inside I see (among all the wires and motors and shit) a nut on a threaded shaft... the pivot for the up-and-down movement... and the nut is loose. Almost tightened down against the bearing, but sloppy loose. It's letting the moving part of the mount sag and flop around as it rotates. There it is. The root cause. I snugged it up finger tight, and immediately was able to align the stupid thing. Told Celestron. A few nights later, the nut is loose again. It sits right against the bearing, so every time it moves 'up,' it loosens it a little. "Celestron? How tight should I make this nut to keep it from loosening every time the tube moves up and down?" "You shouldn't adjust that. Alignments are hard. Keep practicing." Now, 6 years later, after lots of hand-tightening every time we get it out, which is about once a year at this point, I decide to ask on an astronomy forum about how tight the nut should be. I figure maybe if it wasn't such a pain in the ass to use, I might get it out more often. I had tried tightening it up with a wrench a few years ago, just a little past finger-tight, and it became almost impossible to move the tube. (It's on a slip clutch, so you can move it by hand without using the sope's motors.) I figured a lock nut ("Nylock") would be a good way to set it and forget it, so went searching for maybe a torque spec or known method to prevent it coming unscrewed. One forum asked for a picture of the nut in question, and immediately they wnt nuts... the bearing wasn't seated fully or correctly, and was at a slight angle. I went back to Celestron. "Here's the problem. It wasn't assembled correctly. How do I get a new bearing... and probably drive gears too after years of using misaligned hardware?" I'm thinking I have the original emails from 6 years ago, which in hindsight point to exactly this as the problem, so the least they could do is say "oops our bad let us fix it for you cuz we're cool like that kthxbai." However, it only had a 2-year warranty. "Oh, you need a new motor and control board. $200 if we ship the parts to you." I decided to try forcing the bearing in straight, just to see if it's able to. It's in an aluminum frame, the pivot rod is only 1/4" diameter, hanging a 3-foot tube with a 5-inch glass mirror on it for 6 years may have squished the bearing into the aluminum. It had, a little. I was able to get it in straight(er) but couldn't put enough force on it to drive it home. Their bearing is pretty flimsy, I don't know why the FUCK they didn't use something even slightly stonger. But anyway. Put it back together, balanced it, powered it up... "Communication error with drive unit." New hand controller: $120. tldr Spent $650 on a telescope that as it turns out was assembled wrong, so it wouldn't work right. Celestron says it's a 'practice' issue after purchasing a few hundred dollers in shit to rule out various probable causes. Didn't find out the assembly problem until after 6 years. It's not longer under warranty, so $200 for parts so === I === can fix it at home. And now the hand controller isn't working right. Fuck them.

(post is archived)

[–] • 4 pts

Ah damn it. Yeah that's Celestron for you. Modern version of those crappy department store refractors.

You can build your own http://www.dobstuff.com

[–] [deleted] • 2 pts

That looks pretty cool. Might have to spend some time there!

[–] • 3 pts (edited )

Buy a new one straight from the manufacturer web site. keep the box. call tech support. tell them it doesnt power on. Get an RMA number. Put the old one in it. Return the old broken one. Ask what day you can expect credit will apply. Call your credit card company the day after. Dispute the charge. Send your bank tracking proving you returned, and the email showing theyd refund you, but they never credited back and left message but no response. ask your bank to block them from charging your card

Same thing happened to me with something else. If you are worried about serial number then just take the parts out you need but I wouldnt even care if they caught me, to be honest. It puts onus on them to chase you instead of other way around.

Modern problems modern solutions.

[–] • 2 pts

Tweet them with this and embarrass them. Only thing to do.

[–] [deleted] • 0 pt

Can't embarrass someone who doesn't care. But I'll be lighting them up this evening. Turns out the replacement parts they told me I need aren't even the right ones.

[–] • 1 pt

Alt-Az mounts are toys

get a cheap Equatorial mount if you really want one that will last

duh

[–] [deleted] • 0 pt

See... This is the first telescope we've owned. Had it actually worked (or been diagnosed and fixed) 6 years ago, then I would likely know enough about it now to know anything about what that means. duh.

[–] • 0 pt

of course it's never your own fault

[–] • 1 pt

Funny. I was looking at buying one of these recently. At the price point... But The more I have been looking, the more and more negative stuff I have been finding.

[–] [deleted] • 1 pt

Buy any other brand. Found out last night the replacement parts they told me I need aren't the right parts anyway.

They are a cluster with a capital F.

[–] • 0 pt (edited )

I'm assuming you got the Advanced VX. This was my first auto equatorial mount and I'm very familiar with it.

A. "Communication error with drive unit"

We'll get the easy one out of the way. You burned out the hand controller. There are 4 RJ11 plugs right next to each other and only one of them WON'T burn the controller out. Stupid design, but it's not celestron's fault. I know this because I did the same thing on a dark night. The reason the error references the drive motor is because the chip that communicates with the motors on the hand controller burned out.

B. It seems you don't know how to polar align. You never mentioned that you aligned the centerline of the mount with Polaris. You were talking about new eyepieces, barlows, balancing and collimation for some reason. When running a 1 or 2 star alignment in the handset, it assumes you have done this. So if you haven't, you'll never get accurate tracking. Even with a badly broken worm gear and a terrible 1 star align it will track fine for visual observation if you polar align. This is also user error.

[–] [deleted] • 0 pt

Also user error:

Let me get this out of the way: I have spent the last 10 years programming and setting up a zeiss cmm. Whether or not that means anything to you, let me skip to the point... I know how to set a coordinate system by locating known fixed points on a component. This scope seems to use similar logic, which is why doing a 3-star alignment made sense to me... mathematically, 3 points will define a circle, a 4th non-planar point will define a sphere. So, 3 stars defines the 'plane' of the sky, and my latitude and logitude defines the centerpoint of the 'sphere' of the sky. X/Y star location turns into degrees (azimuth) and the Z axis then defines an angle from horizontal (altitude.) That all makes perfect sense to me, and while it may not be exactly how the scope is programmed, I'm sure it is doing some very similar calculations. In practice, 4 points is never enough, I'll typically take a cloud of 50-ish points per datum and then apply some nifty filtering to rule out noise, surface condition, etc. Using only 4 points is very error-prone, as a small shift in any one point will have a huge impact on the overall sphere. And closer rogether points compound that effect, so pick widely-spaced datum points. This also makes from the standpoint of a 3-star alignment failing; if there is any slight error in the position of the alignment stars, then the resultant calculated location of all of the objects could be off a great deal. So accuracy is important. My point is, I "get" the alignment process, I'm fairly sure I get what (and how) it's accomplishing. Having said that:

I left out huge parts of the journey getting to this point, for "brevity." Early on, I went through 2- and 3- star alignments for the better part of 4 months using instructions from celestron, which included the following bits of instruction:
Do NOT use planets even though the manual says that's okay. (No problem, I wasn't using planets anyway.) Do NOT use polaris or polar alignments even though the manual says that's okay, the 2- and 3- star alignments are "better." I gave them a list of the stars I was using, making sure they were spaced quite far apart. They deemed those stars to be acceptable. I assumed they were using these specific alignment methods for troubleshooting reasons. I had no idea at the time what I was doing wrong and so I was following their instructions to the letter. Don't use the 25 or the 9mm eyepieces that came with the scope for alignments, use a 20mm instead. Set the mount and the tube to the alt and az index marks before doing an alignment. "But my scope doesn't have index marks anywhere." Oh, not all telescopes have them. But you should use them. You don't need to use the azimuth index mark on yours, but you should use one on the alt axis. (I have the tech support emails. This is all true.)

I will admit that my lack of experience on this may make it sound like I do not know how to do it your way, but the only practical experience I have has been by following the instructions of a supposed expert who insisted the only thing I'm doing wrong is not practicing their way enough to move on to other ways. So I have tried, and failed, easily 200 3-star alignments by following a very narrow set of instructions because I was led to believe if I did not do it this exact way with almost no margin of error, then it would not work and I would never be "ready" for other methods.

The only times it did work were when I tightened up an almost fingertight nut in the drive unit. An almost-fingertight nut in the drive unit looks like this: https://pic8.co/sh/r5xkHg.jpg https://pic8.co/sh/o3usUc.jpg

That loose nut was not important to celestron, only: keep practicing until you get it and you will find there are alot [sic] of other alignment methods that people use but keep practicing this way until you get better at it. "Please tell me some of these other methods." Just keep practicing and I swear you'll get it.

My immediate realization was: The loose screw let the tube drift quite easily as the drive gear was not fully in contact with the friction pads that keep it moving in unison with the drive gear. Finger tight holds the assembly together well enough to keep the tube from drifting. Any tighter, the whole thing locks up. Any looser, and slewing at motor speed > 6 will let the tube keep moving after the motor stops.

I didn't realize until I took that picture for an astronomy forum last week that the bearing was seated wrong.

The crooked bearing means every time it slews up, the nut rotates with it. When moving back down, the nut stays stationary. It self-loosens just by using it.

So I have opened the case a few dozen times over the years to re-snug the screw, my assumption is it can't communicate with the drive motor because I've loosened a wire or connector, but it has also been over a year since I've had the controller plugged in so you could be correct about that being a fuck-up on my part. The loose wire or connector sounds more likely to me, but I also simply do not know at this point.

Celestron ignored the loose nut over 5 years ago; this could have all been avoided if they took a moment to actually try and help a customer with a legitimate problem. Like when I said "loose nut" and asked them how tight the nut should be, and would a locking nut stay in place without causing issues. Isn't that a red flag to them? Dismissing it as a lack of ability on the customer's part is a dick move.

My issue with them is that they still ignore the entire thing and say "Yeah it'll cost you a few hundred to fix something that we should have taken care of when it was still under warranty."