In my opinion, the Celestron Nexstars are the best overall, general purpose telescopes money can buy (tripod, mount, and optical tube in a single package). I have used both the 4" and the 8". There are trade-offs with size.

The 4SE is very light, more stable, easy to carry in one piece outside your house, adjusts to temperature differences rapidly, and has razor sharp clarity without ever requiring mirror adjustment (collimation). You can see pretty much every object with the 4 that you can see with the 8, it's just dimmer.

The 8SE is bulkier, heavier, shakier, harder to carry in one piece, adjusts slowly to temperature differences (sometimes 1 hour), but everything looks a little bigger and brighter, and it requires occasional (a few times a year depending on how rough you handle the scope) mirror adjustment with a screwdriver which can be annoying if you are a perfectionist. The better your collimation, the better your clarity.

You can't really go wrong with any size. Get what fits your budget. My advice if you get one, get a 8-24mm zoom eyepiece, a 32mm eyepiece, and you are good for years of enjoyment. Keep the legs low to minimize shaking, sit in a chair, and buy the anti-vibration pads (generic brand is just as good as the Celestrons). Once you master this telescope, you can upgrade the mount if you want to get into more advanced photography. Keep looking up!

This is a GREAT telescope. Don't let other reviews or Youtube videos try to convince you that you should go with the 5" or 6" since they are smaller and more portable...light gathering ability is EVERYTHING in a telescope, and the 8" gathers ~78% more light than the 6SE model.

Out of the box, however, so you are not disappointed, there is a bare minimum of two accessories that you MUST have:

1) Either an AC adapter to power the scope or a Celestron "PowerTank" or a car or motorcycle battery with a car adapter cord to plug in to your telescope. I have the Celestron Power Tank 17. The power tank uses cigarette lighter style power cords which you can also plug into your car's dashboard if observing remotely next to your vehicle and you buy the car adapter. Although the scope can run on AA batteries, it will eat them up in less than an hour, rendering the scope slow and eventually unusable.

2) Buy a dew shield (Celestron #940009 for 8" scopes) , which is only $23.00 or so...that will keep the night dew from forming on the front of the telescope's "corrector" (the front of the telescope) as the temperature drops at night.

The above is the bare minimum I would order if buying this telescope. Anything less will adversely impact the enjoyment of it.

Expectation management: With the above, yes, in the summer in the Northern hemisphere, you can see the rings of Saturn and you can clearly make out Jupiter. It will blow your mind if you've never seen those planets with your own eyes. However, don't expect to see great detail and have the image fill up the view as some of the pictures in these reviews indicate. The human eye cannot see the color and detail that a long exposure (30 seconds or so) can reveal when you hook a camera up to this telescope. You will immediately want some eyepieces that allow you to zoom in further, so let me help you with that process.

I strongly recommend that you buy a 2" diagonal and eyepiece setup. Again, the scope, out of the box, only comes with a single 25MM 1.25" eyepiece, which has a narrow field of view and not enough magnification to really enjoy your first astonishing views that get you hooked on astronomy, like looking at Saturn and seeing the gaps in the rings.

Celestron sells a kit that has a diagonal, 2X Barlow Lens and three 2" eyepieces (Kit #94305 - $300.00). You can buy that for starters to get you going with 2" eyepieces at the lowest cost.

If you have the financial means to "do it all right the first time" without buying the same type of things twice, I would recommend that - instead of buying the 2" starter kit - you buy the Celestron 93527 2" diagonal, which has the Starbright XLT coatings and can be used with 2" eyepieces as well as the 1.25" eyepiece that comes with the telescope, the Celestron Luminos 2.5X Barlow lens (#93436) which will allow you to more than double your magnification with any eyepiece, and some better eyepieces.

Most people will tell you that you can get by with about three eyepieces initially. Here are some recommendations:

If money is no object, buy TeleVue. They are the high-end in the telescope world. Around $300-$800 each depending on what you choose. If you are going to spend that kind of money, join the CloudyNights forum and get some custom-tailored recommendations from other TeleVue users.

I'm going to stick to cheaper (but still good) products that are well respected and a good value.

First eyepiece: Meade Instruments Ultra Wide Angle 20mm 2-Inch Waterproof Eyepiece (7743), which you can get here on Amazon for around $120. With the aforementioned Barlow adapter, that will give you 20 MM and 8MM views.

Second eyepiece: Explore Scientific 82° 30MM eyepiece. In order to use it, you will have to add a longer dove-tail rail to your telescope to move the scope farther forward in the mount to balance it out.I use an ADM V Series Extra Long (VC-8XL). I had to cut the aft mount bracket to make it fit on this telescope. With the 2.5 Barlow, that gives you 30 and 15MM views.

You can buy Celestron Luminos eyepieces, but they sometimes suffer from Edge Of Field Brightness (EOFB) which some astronomers find distracting. If you go with Luminos, buy the 19MM and 23MM. I own those two, but they are not as good as the other two I recommended.

If you did not know it, in the telescope world, the smaller MM eyepeice means more zoom-in (greater magnification). You divide the focal length of the scope (2032MM for the Nexstar 8SE) by the eyepiece MM to get the zoom...Example: 2032/19 = 107x. You can use the diagonal and eyepieces I have recommended with larger Celestron telescopes should you upgrade in the future to an even larger telescope (I have a Celestron C11 on a CG5-ASGT mount as well).

This scope is perfect for a beginner, can be set-up in about 10 minutes, and aligns easily by pointing to three bright objects in the sky. It is the ultimate "grab-n-go" telescope. It is NOT ideal for astro-photography, as it is an Altitude/Azimuth (ALT/AZ) telescope and BOTH motors must run at the same time to track an object, which is not as precise as a German Equatorial Mount (GEM) where only one motor has to run to track an object. GEM's require polar alignment, which is a bit complex for the beginner.

If a bigger easy-to-use ALT/AZ scope is wanted, the next step up from the 8SE would be the CPC Deluxe 925HD (9.25") or CPC 1100 series (11")...or if you get into Astronomy and astro-photography, jump to a GEM telescope.

4 Stars since it does not include an AC adapter or DC cigarette lighter cord out-of-the-box. With those items, I'd give it 5!

Perfect value beginner telescope. Needs power adapter (AC, Cig lighter or powertank) and eyepiece upgrades to really be fun...

Love this scope, here are the pictures i took with a self made wedge and simple guider scope.

This review is for the NexStar 8 SE, the 8 inch one ... Got it as an Amazon warehouse deal which shaved off $200, was in absolutely perfect condition. Easy to put together and set up. Make sure you get the AC adapter because it eats trough the batteries pretty quickly.

Even though it's an Alt-Azimuth mount (not an equatorial) it tracks objects pretty well. The picture on the right is the Orion Nebula M42, I took the picture two weeks after I got the telescope. I attached a Canon EOS T3i with a t-adaper and added a Celestron LPR UHC filter to reduce light pollution. The final result is 50 10-sec frames, stacked. You can see a video of the whole thing on youtube under Nm7Pxb3jENs .

Great Telescope for 3 years now. I bought the 5" for the polar alignment feature. There are many good reviews on here about the scope already. So, I'll just say that you don't really 'see' what these images show, you need a decent camera and a computer to process your photos into stunning images. I would also suggest getting the Celestron Star Sense Auto Align, it will save time and that means more viewing. The Orion Nebula was shot with a Sony A6000 at 30 Sec ISO3200 using a Celestron 94123 1.25-Inch UHC/LPR Filter and is a single image. Jupiter was created from a series of video frames shot with the Celestron NexImage 5.