53% off Celestron's 114AZ Smartphone-Ready Telescope, now just $85 for Black Friday
[www.space.com]

Deal ends Wednesday Nov 25.

Celestron's 114AZ smartphone-ready reflector telescope is on sale right now at Kohl's for $99.99, which is a big discount from the usual price of $179.99. What makes the deal even better is that you can use the checkout code THANKS for an extra 15% discount bringing the total price down to just $84.99. As that's above $75 you also get free shipping from Kohl's as part of the deal.

The Celeston 114AZ is a 114mm Newtonian reflector telescope that's suitable for beginners. It comes with a StarPointer Red Dot finderscope for manual alignment and to help you track down night-sky targets, while an included smartphone adapter allows you to use your smartphone to easily take photos.

It also comes with two eyepieces. The 20mm eyepiece is good for solar system targets like the moon, while the 4mm eyepiece offers a magnification of up to 150x for deep-space objects like galaxies and nebulas. There's also a 3x Barlow lens thrown into the bargain that can increase the magnification of both eyepieces even further.

BONUS!! Included is ($50)free download of Starry Night software for Mac or PC or smartphone. This software comes free with the Celestron 114AZ-SR, but costs $49.95 to buy from Starry Night. It provides the precise positions of more than 36,000 targets to help you on your skywatching adventures.

Man, I WANT one. But I can't justify it, even at that price....

Looks like a decent deal but appear to be many plastic pieces on that telescope and the tripod, which scare me off. And I'm looking for a scope as a gift.

The tripod for that scope is a known POS.

It would be horribly frustrating to use.

Every telescope is "Smartphone Ready".

The software is utterly useless as well. The way you find objects in a small non-computerized telescope is by star hopping with star charts. You find a know object that can't be mistaken for anything else in your finder scope, something like Betelgeuse for example, and then you methodically hop from that object to another object until you reach your target.

One more thing...setting circles on small telescopes are useless as well. You can easily have cumulative errors that are greater than the field of view of even your finder scope.