I purchased many Telescopes and I enjoy the Celestron Travel Scope 70 Telescope. I changed the Tripod that came with it I use the Tripod if I am going to travel and I replaced it with the Meade Instruments Classic 30 Photo Tripod and I also will replace the Finders Scope and will attach the Celestron Star Pointer Finders Scope Red Dot item number 51630. The Eyepieces are Great and I will not replace them. The backpack is cool and I like when I put the Telescope in the backpack. I also like the diagonals and I will use the two diagonals that Celestron sells. I like the Celestron Star diagonal and the Celestron ***** Image diagonal. I feel that this is a great Telescope and I will use it a lot.

Great little telescope. I got this as a New Year's present because I got an APO for a Christmas present. This is my car telescope, permanently installed under the passenger seat. I completely modified it as a DYI project. I blackened the edges of the lenses, discarded the tripod and finder, replaced the diagonal and eyepieces ( although these were OK), installed a solar filter in the dust cap, and epoxied a red dot finder base on it. On a good video tripod it is a performer at lower powers (17x-~50x). Best for the money if you are willing to hack.

For the price this scope is worth it even if you throw away the tripod it comes with. Get a better tripod and mount and you are good to go with this thing.

I bought this telescope for my son and it works great. For the price this telescope is a pretty good value. It's great for looking at star clusters which need a wide field of view to fit the whole thing into view. It's a great telescope since it's fast to set up and take outside for a few minutes. Excellent service and with on time delivery from seller.

This review is based on tests I did last night watching the sky. This is certainly not my first scope, I was searching for a lightweight tube with interchangeable eyepieces but not for observing, but for auto-guiding with a CCD, this proved to be a good option because it's not heavy, has 400mm of focal length and accepts 1.25 barrel eyepieces I do not recommend this scope for astronomy, it has a small aperture and the supplied eyepieces are not so quite good, also without the diagonal, the scope does not reach focus for the eyepieces, though it has a T-thread on the back, a Canon 300D was succesfully attached and focused to infinity and was able to photograph stars, which was another thing I was looking forward to. The tripod supplied is certainly NOT recommended, it's very shaky and seems it's going to collapse under it's own weight when fully extended, get another one. On the bright side, it comes with a pre-installed CG-5 compatible dovetail which can be attached to a NexStar SE mount or a CG-5GT, also it has two 1/4 threads for photo/video tripods. It comes with two CD-ROM disks, The Sky X First Light edition which surprisingly runs smoothly on an Atom 1.6GHz 10 Netbook and another one which contains the manual in different languages. The finderscope is not good at all, Don't attach it unless you really really really really want it for cosmetic purposes, not needed anyways The color is quite nice, it's a metallic dark shade of gray, which matches my C6 which I use for Astro-photography, or at least I try to do so. In overall, It is a good scope for the price, very inexpensive but not the same quality as Celestron's astronomical scopes If you are after a spotter scope with interchangeable eyepieces but want to do astronomical observations as well, I would recommend the C90 spotter which is a Maksutov-Cassegrain design. Clear skies! Efrain S.

I was looking for a small portable scope as a compliment to the binoculars I take with me on vacations and trips and this little 70mm scope kit from Celestron does the job nicely. The 20x and 40x EPs are bright, crisp and have a much longer reach than my 7x, 8x and 10x binoculars. I found the finderscope unnecessary though, since I'll be using this scope mainly for terrestrial and nature viewing (with maybe an occasional peek at the moon. The supplied tripod is a little shaky when its legs and center-post are fully extended but when fully retracted, is compact and light and fits well in the backpack as does the scope. Overall, I am very pleased with the Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope kit. I think it provides a good value at a great price as well as an alternative to those looking into purchasing a traditional spotting-type scope. Thanks OPT for offering this item!