In the 1970s, the classic Celestron 8 brought the hobby of astronomy to the masses and established Celestron as the world's premier telescope maker. Our founder, Tom Johnson, invented Celestron's proprietary method of producing Schmidt corrector plates for superior views and maximum portability. Johnson believed in creating high-quality optical instruments at an affordable price, and inspired a generation of amateur astronomers. SkyAlign allows you to align on any three bright celestial objects, making for a fast and easy alignment process If deep space galaxies and faint nebulae are your things, then that’s more of a challenge, although this guy seems to be doing just fine, judging from his pictures. With a full 8 inches of aperture, the 8SE reveals details in even the faintest celestial objects. With this much light-gathering ability, you’ll clearly observe Cassini’s Division in Saturn’s rings, the cloud bands on Jupiter, and the Great Red Spot. Beyond the solar system, your 8SE will show you hundreds of pinpoint stars in the Hercules Globular Cluster, the spiral arms of the Whirlpool Galaxy, and more. And don’t forget the Moon—you’ll see craters and geographic features like never before. The planets were not ideally placed at the time of our review, but we did manage to make out Syrtis Major and a polar cap on Mars, despite the small size of its disc.

The database and goto motor take away all the heartache of trying to locate an object by map reading and star-hopping. Instead, with these clever electronics, you’ll go straight to the object you want to see and use your precious viewing time studying it rather than trying to find it! How to Use Celestron’s SkyAlign Technology Objects too high would cause a camera attached to the rear end of the tube to catch on the base, but we found we could image objects lower than 60º as long as we used very high ISO values and exposures shorter than 20 seconds. The 8SE mount has a Vixen saddle, so it can take other optical tubes in theory. However, only a Schmidt-Cassegrain or Maksutov-Cassegrain of the same size or smaller will be able to clear the base. Should I buy a Used Celestron NexStar 8SE? If you’re interested in astroimaging, the NexStar SE is Fastar-compatible for ultra-fast, wide field imaging. For planetary imaging, there’s no better choice than a NexStar 8SE paired with one of our Skyris and NexImage cameras. From your first observing session and for years to come, the NexStar SE is your trusted companion. The mount is a single-arm, all-in-one unit with the neatly integrated NexStar hand controller, which can be pulled out when in use.It’s time to complete the setup by telling it where in the world you are so you can find objects to look at with ease. Getting to this point is straightforward and rewarding, and does not require existing comprehension of the night sky.

An altazimuth mount can simply be moved up/down and left/right. This means you can point your scope at any part of the sky but, unlike an equatorial mount, altazimuth mounts are not aligned to Earth’s angle of rotation.Those small scopes make a little more sense now. They all have very fast lens with medium focal lengths and are built for astrophotography. Could you use them for visual astronomy? You could, but for eyeballs the big guys like the Nexstar 8SE will do a much better job. A StarPointer red-dot finder, E-Lux 25mm, 1.25-inch fit Plössl eyepiece and a star diagonal complete the optical tube assembly. The aperture of the telescope is large enough to pull in enough starlight to reveal the planets in detail, as well as some of the best deep-sky objects in the night sky. Final Thoughts To help you point directly at them, you can use the included red dot finder. Keep both eyes open, and move the scope until the red dot is directly on the star. When you look in the eyepiece, it should be right there, or very close. Once initial setup, alignment, and collimation are out of the way, the 8” aperture of the NexStar 8SE computerised telescope will show you a lot.

A 1.25″ 25mm Plossl eyepiece was included with the telescope. This is a useful magnification for a variety of objects in the night sky from planets, to bright galaxies. The Celestron NexStar 8SE’s finderscope is a simple red dot finder, which is all you need to align the GoTo system—after alignment is complete, you don’t really need a finder at all. Mount Capabilities of the 8SEThis article gives you much more detail about what you should expect to see with 8″ of aperture, compared to just 6 inches. For example, looking at the second-last row, you’ll see that a telescope of NexStar 8SE’s size will do a much better job of resolving double stars separated by less than an arcsecond. If it’s planets you’re after, get a decent high-magnification eyepiece too, something in the 10mm or lower range. When there’s a difference in temperature between the scope and the air outside, you don’t get great performance. Neptune and Uranus show themselves as blueish dots. It is not easy, but you may get a glimpse of their moons in perfect conditions.