comments:
Amazing find! Your 15-year-old is definitely old enough to use this on their own and your 10-year-old may be too, or is at least quickly approaching an age where they will be able to As someone else said, the StarSense phone dock is worth money all on its own; somewhere between $75 and $150. You can send a message to Celestron support telling them you got a used StarSense Explorer telescope that didn't come with the app code, they'll ask for photo proof of your ownership, and then they'll give you a new code for free (usable on five devices). If I were you, I'd try using a bulb air blower to remove the larger debris, but not clean the mirror. Reflector telescopes work very well even when they look dirty and the act of cleaning the mirror is the most risky part of long-term telescope maintenance, so it's usually only advisable once it gets really dirty. If you do want to go through with cleaning it, the O.W.L. fingertip method works really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y8xFnXFVGQ Check out the manual that someone else linked to for the collimation process. It's a normal part of the observing process with a reflector, so you'll want to learn how to do it. You'll need one or two accessories to do so, depending on how you want to do it. You can do it all with a cheshire tube: https://agenaastro.com/agena-1-25-collimating-eyepiece-newtonian-reflectors.html Or, with a cheshire tube or collimation cap (https://agenaastro.com/agena-1-25-collimating-eyepiece-newtonian-reflectors.html) and a laser collimator: https://www.amazon.com/Astromania-Alignment-Generation-Collimator-Telescopes/dp/B01D8HMBCQ A laser collimator makes a part of the process much easier to do, but a laser collimator requires its own collimation, so that's a big downside. (Sometimes people will say you can align the secondary mirror with the laser collimator, but this isn't completely true because it's possible for the secondary mirror to be so far off that doing to supposed secondary mirror alignment process with a laser will result in an incorrect setup. It's best to do the secondary mirror alignment without the laser.) If the manual doesn't have much info on collimation, there are some good tutorials on youtube. Here's one for the process with only a cheshire tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zb-XsOoR8U&t=506s Here's one for using a cap and a (well-collimated) laser collimator (first watch the secondary mirror process, then skip to the part of the video showing the laser portion): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAVGcGEBmCE&t=139s (for how to collimate a laser collimator, here's yet another video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZsgNlgIrqQ)