Not only are the views through the finder quite dim and less-than-sharp, but the cheap bracket is poorly made and makes it somewhat difficult to align with the scope. The finderscope on the 50AZ – as with all the PowerSeekers – is a plastic-bodied, plastic lens 5×24 unit. Getting a hybrid diagonal will probably cost nearly as much as the entire scope by itself, as will a quality 1.25” eyepiece or two. All of these accessories are, of course, in the outdated 0.965” format, which severely limits upgrades without the purchase of an expensive hybrid diagonal, which converts the scope to the more commonly used format of 1.25” eyepieces.
Oddly enough, the star diagonal is actually the worst of all – the mirror is nowhere near optically flat and significantly distorts the image. The included barlow is absolutely unusable, being made entirely of plastic with extremely low optical quality. The 4mm Huygens is actually too much magnification for the scope to physically handle – and, of course, the mount is so shaky that you’d be lucky to see anything at all with that magnification. The Huygens eyepieces have a very narrow field of view and tiny lenses that make the view feel like you’re looking through a drinking straw, and the construction of all the accessories is almost entirely plastic. All of the accessories featured with the scope are made from cheap, low-quality plastic that completely bottlenecks the optical performance of the PowerSeeker. This may seem like a generous amount of accessories for your money, but don’t be fooled. Along with that, the scope features a 3x Barlow lens and a 90-degree star diagonal to make viewing through the eyepiece more comfortable. The Celestron PowerSeeker 50AZ comes with 4 eyepieces: 20mm, 14mm, and 4mm Huygens oculars (providing 30x, 50x, and 150x, respectively) and a 1.5x image-erecting eyepiece that flips the image right-side up. Additionally, the focuser is 0.965” format which is no longer a size used by reputable telescope manufacturers, and obtaining quality 0.965” accessories is rather difficult. The dew shield is shiny and thus can cause glare and reflection issues, while the rack-and-pinion focuser is so poorly made that its teeth are easily broken. This material choice in itself is not a huge problem – plenty of good scopes use plastic – but the low-quality workmanship combined with it is. While the tube is metal, the dew shield and focuser on the 50AZ are entirely plastic. Of course, the base quality of the optics is almost entirely irrelevant because pretty much every other aspect of the scope is junk. While absolutely tiny, the achromatic doublet objective lens is actually of high quality (glass, not plastic) and the f/12 focal ratio means there is basically no chromatic aberration, or false color, which you’d typically get on many larger refractors. The Celestron PowerSeeker 50AZ is, as the name implies, a 50mm refractor, with a focal length of 600mm and thus a focal ratio of f/12.
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