If you’ve read my stories, you’ll know that I have a passion for the stars. Growing up, I had a refractor telescope and when I got my first job I bought a 4.5” reflector. I’ve been interested in upgrading, and decided upon the Nexstar 8SE. After a week of stargazing, I plopped a review on Amazon and thought I’d post it here as well:
There are over four hundred Amazon reviews for this telescope, so I won't cover all of the technical details already discussed; instead, I'll hit on some of the things I still had questions about before buying the Nexstar 8SE.
One of the hard things about choosing a telescope is knowing how you want to use it. Whether you want to look at planets (which are super bright) or deep space objects (which are super dim) affects your choice. A scope with tons of magnification from a long focal length may be great for Saturn but have too much zoom for things like the Andromeda Galaxy.
Portability is also a factor. Can you carry the entire assembled scope out on to the deck yourself each night, or do you need to spend an hour lugging it out piecemeal, assembling, leveling, and aligning it? Once it's set up, how easy is it to find objects? If you want to look at Jupiter and the Moon - piece of cake...but what about objects too faint to see with your naked eye? Do you have the time and skill to read star charts under a red light, hunting-and-pecking across the night sky searching for dim fuzzies?
Lastly, do you want to take photos of your view? If you want exposures of more than a few seconds, does your mount have a way to compensate for the Earth's rotation to prevent your stars from blurring to streaks? If you're taking pictures of big things, like a nebula, will you have to make a mosaic because your scope has too much magnification to fit it all in frame?
I thought about all of these, and chose the Nexstar 8SE. It is a great scope and fairly easy to use (although not as easy as Celestron's "no knowledge of the night sky needed" slogan suggests). Here's how it fares for my selection criteria:
Portability:
If hours of free time are needed between setup and gazing, the scope will be relegated to weekend use only. That may not seem bad, but consider that out of those weekends, it'll further be whittled down to ones with clear nights. So, if I don't want a scope I can use only once or twice a month, I need something portable. The 8SE weighs 33 lbs fully assembled (and can easily be separated into three lighter components). So, imagine picking up a 16 lb bowling bowl in each hand and walking out onto the deck. If you think you could do that, you can carry the 8SE out. I leave mine fully assembled and just carry it out myself whenever there are clear skies. It takes two minutes. If it's too heavy, there are three thumb-tightened knobs that quickly separate the tripod from the mount and tube, splitting the weight in half.
Type of Astronomy:
The 8SE has a 2000 mm focal length and 8" aperture. 2000 mm is two meters (6.5 feet!) so you'd expect the tube to be at least 6.5 feet long unless it can bend space and time. Turns out, it does - well, not literally - but it's a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope so it uses both reflectors and refractors to double-up the light path, resulting in a very short, fat tube that is highly portable. It's a great "best of both worlds" solution. High focal length (which translates to magnification) for planetary and lunar views and wide aperture (which translates to brightness and detail) for views of dim objects like galaxies. For me, it's perfect. I can bounce around the night sky seeing all of the planets and everything in the Messier catalog (globular clusters, nebula, and galaxies). The 8SE comes with a diagonal and a single 1.25" 25mm Plossl eyepiece that is one of my favorite eyepieces for this scope. With it, you will clearly see a small Saturn with its rings and shadows, or the disc of Jupiter with small cloud bands and its four largest moons. Deep-sky objects will be faint, dim cotton balls. Of course, you can increase the magnification by buying additional eyepieces or increase the contrast of DSOs with filters. I have a small refractor scope that uses 1.25" eyepieces and filters, and all of them are interchangeable with the 8SE.
Astrophotography:
I think it surprised me that most of those awesome astrophotography pics we've seen that look like Hubble telescope photos are taken with cameras or sensors attached to small refractor scopes. They're all taken on equatorial mounts that are polar aligned, rotating like clockwork to compensate for the Earth's rotation. The default 8SE cannot do this. It has an alt-az mount, not an EQ. Although it will track an object and keep it centered, it's just not able to rotate in the direction that the sky does. As a result, the object will spin in place over time, and all the neighboring stars will orbit it, leaving streaks. You can purchase an EQ wedge that tilts the entire mount onto a polar axis but to be honest for the price and added weight of the 15 lb wedge you could just get a Sky Watcher mount and tripod and plop a DSLR with a decent lens on it, taking some nice wide-field long-exposure photos. That being said, short-exposure photography works great on the 8SE. A cheap t-adapter lets me attach my DSLR directly to the back of the scope. I can manage fifteen-second exposures without star trails. I took the attached photo of the Hercules cluster this way (by the way - for reference - the Hercules cluster does not look like this to your eye in the scope. In the scope, it is a milky cotton ball). So, can you throw a couple of thousand dollars to convert the 8SE into a long-exposure astrophotography scope? Sure - but I would suggest instead using that money to buy a separate, dedicated mount and tripod for DSLR photography.
Ease of Finding Objects:
First, you can just use the keypad arrows to slew the scope wherever you want without bothering to align it. Line up a star or planet in the red dot finder and just have a look; however, if you want the telescope to find and track it, you'll have to align it. There are four ways to do this: 1) 3-object auto-align: center the scope on any three bright stars or planets and the controller will plate-solve to figure out what they are. You don't even need to know or tell it their names; however, every time I tried this, it failed. 2) 2-star auto-align: center the scope on one star and tell the controller what it is, then it picks the second star and you center it. Works sometimes, but the scope has no way of knowing if its chosen star is obstructed (by trees, neighbor's houses). 3) 2-star manual align: You pick two stars, tell the controller their names, and center them. Always works for me. 4) 1-star manual align: Same as two-star, but less accurate. 5) I know I said there were only four options, but a fifth option is to buy the somewhat-expensive Sky Align accessory, which is a camera that will do all of this for you. I find that the two-star align is accurate for the part of the sky you chose when picking alignment stars, but quickly loses accuracy when you swing to distant parts of the sky. Fortunately, you can pick new alignment stars on-the-fly, so I typically align to the southern sky, see everything I want, then realign to the northern sky. When the alignment is accurate, it's really great for finding deep space objects. I can look at a dozen DSOs in thirty minutes, where I could look at only two or three if doing it manually. The single review-star I deducted is due to the somewhat endless frustration I have with the GoTo alignment process, and that in general I haven't been able to just align the scope to the sky, but have to realign to portions of the sky as I look in different areas. One other complaint is that the 8SE's controller has been upgraded over time (to have a mini-USB connection instead of RS-232), but the telescope's manual was not updated. The manual still has photos and instructions only for the old controller, including keypad buttons which are in different locations or have different names.
So, I think the 8SE hits the Venn-diagram sweet-spot intersection of portability, aperture, and focal length for me, and I'm happy with my purchase and recommend it to others searching for that same intersection.
When I’m not flying the virtual skies, I’m the sci-fi author of the Hayden’s World series. If you love exploration and adventure, be sure to check it out.