If you are looking to expand your eyepiece selection on a budget, this might be the kit you’ve been looking for.

There are a lot of kits out there, and each has some trade-offs, including this one, but we believe this is the best overall value for the money.

TLDR: 

This is our favorite beginner eyepiece kit for the money, though every telescope accessory kit has trade-offs.

The Eyepieces

The Celestron value pack comes with a bunch of eyepieces, five of them to be precise. They range from fairly long focal lengths to really short, and all of them are fully-multicoated for excellent light transmission.

All of the eyepieces in this kit are Plossl designs. The included focal lengths are 32mm, 17mm, 13mm, 8mm, and 6mm.

The first thing most will notice is that these eyepieces don’t couple well with the included 2x Barlow, as there is a lot of redundancy. The 32 when Barlowed gives a magnification very similar to the 17mm, and so on.

Only the 6 and the 8 are exempt from this redundancy, and with their short eye-relief they are a bit harder to look through.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the five eyepieces present plenty of viewing options, and the Barlow can be used as a supplement to these by allowing you to use an eyepiece with a nicer eye relief for essentially the same view in most cases.

The addition of a low magnification eyepiece is always a good thing for panning the Milky Way or finding celestial targets. It would have been nice to include a 40mm instead, but we might be nitpicking a bit based on our preferences with that statement.

The Barlow

The barlow is also fully-multicoated, something you don’t see in these kits very often. Celestron has done their diligence to squeeze top-quality glass into a budget-friendly Plossl kit, and we love it.

A good quality Barlow is an essential for the beginner. Even with the range of eyepieces being quite redundant, Barlow lenses have many uses beyond increasing magnification.

A lot of beginner scopes are a tad short on the focal length, and a good Barlow like the short tube included in this kit can really clean up the view when using the accompanying eyepieces, effectively reducing coma and other optical effects for crisp views to the edge of the field of view.

The Filters

There are six colors to choose from to help you tease details out of planets and increase the sharpness of certain views.

The moon filter will help to save your night vision a bit while scanning craters and canyons, reducing the “blinding” effect of observing the moon in the dark.

There’s really not much to say when it comes to color filters, though, as they are easy extras. They thread into the eyepieces well, and work for what they are intended. We don’t use color filters much around here, but some people love them, and having a diverse kit with you is never a bad thing.

Overall Review Conclusion

Choosing the Celestron 1.25” Eyepiece and Filter Accessory Kit as our favorite budget lens kit wasn’t easy, but we think this one gets the nod, mostly due to the fully-multicoated Barlow, not to mention the eyepieces getting the same treatment.

The Orion Accessory Kit competing with it is of similar construction with a similar case, price, and filters. Unfortunately, it trades a more diverse range of viewing options for glass that, while still coated, isn’t quite as good for light transmission.

It’s really hard to make the call between the two. But if the eyepieces included give you the range of magnifications that you want (and most of the time they will, even without the Barlow expansion) then this is the kit for you.

Starting with good glass will help develop your love for the hobby of astronomy, and sticking with fully-multicoated glass is a good way to ensure quality.

Rest assured, all of the optics in this kit are very good quality, and should provide you a solid baseline to upgrade your scope and a well-rounded set for future scope purchases as well.