W
William Gibson
Disappointing
Some months ago my family clubbed together and bought me a Celestron NexStar 5SE Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope on the internet This type of equipment has a glass disc the corrector plate in the middle of which sits the secondary mirror and which is mounted in annular brackets at the front end of the tube After the third occasion I d used it I decided to check the cleanliness of the corrector plate when I brought it back indoors It was only then I noticed that stuck on the inside edge of the corrector plate there appeared to be a small cereal grain husk or similar plant particle which must have unfortunately entered the tube during manufacture and was trapped inside I emailed Celestron support who had replied by initially asking me to remove the corrector plate to extract this particle I declined to do this as I did not feel confident enough about removing a vital part of a brand new and expensive piece of precision equipment While awaiting their further response which turned out to be as I d hoped i e that Celestron would rectify the matter under warranty I decided to find out whether Rother Valley Optics as advertised Celestron agents would carry out work of this nature on their premises My reason for wanting to establish this was that if they did and Celestron was happy to do a warranty repair I would have been quite prepared to drive the 40 miles to RVO and physically hand the telescope over rather than risk dispatching it by courier When I called them and explained the situation it was more than evident from the salesman s tone that when he realised the telescope hadn t been purchased from them they weren t going to be interested in looking at it He was I would say somewhat abrupt and was claiming that they were really too busy in their lab etc at the time In the end the telescope was collected and returned to Celestron who rectified the issue However I have to say that I won t be approaching Rother Valley Optics again Such a pity since it s my intention to advance my hobby by purchasing other telescope equipment and DSLR accessories and they would have been a convenient dealer to do business with I think it goes without saying that any future purchases certainly won t be from them