Celestron 11069 NexStar 8SE Computerised Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope with Advanced GPS, Astroimaging and AutoAlign Features, Black/Orange

Product Information

The Celestron NexStar 8SE is a fantastic scope and one that would suit a beginner, intermediate or advanced sky watcher. Something simple enough for a beginner to get to grips with, but also please an advanced sky watcher is quite hard to come by. 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. 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. Read on to discover its small imperfections (and how to beat them) and find out how to get the most value from it. You’ll also discover what current owners have to say about the 8SE and why they think it was well worth the money spent! The NexStar 8SE compound telescope from Celestron The Celestron NexStar Range of Telescopes The Celestron NexStar 8SE includes a NexStar hand controller, with over 40,000 objects in its database.

I found right ascension, declination, altitude and azimuth thoroughly confusing, but the arm exercise helped me understand it. So, why on earth would you want to use the complicated equatorial mount? The answer is because you are on Earth, and Earth has this inconvenient feature of constantly rotating. Because of the Earth’s rotation, stars travel in arcs across the sky. Like an archer’s arrow, they rise, peak, then fall below the horizon. If you remember your geometry days, trying to draw a circle using (x, y) coordinates is complicated. But drawing it in polar coordinates is mindlessly easy. Alt-az is x,y and equatorial is polar.The higher the magnification of the eyepiece, the more “searching” you will have to do to align the telescope mount to a bright star. Portability 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.

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. The 8″ SCT optical tube assembly mounted to the single-arm fork mount. Attaching an Eyepiece or Camera Its aperture and focal length mean the 8SE gives great viewing. The long focal length – over 2m – means that we get some big magnifications, as the table above shows. Once you’ve got the box open and ready to go, let’s look at how easy the NexStar 8SE is to set up and get operational. Setting Up and Using the NexStar 8SEFor example, the Celestron StarSense Explorer Dob delivers a brighter view at F/5.9, at the cost of a heavier kit to transport (about 42 pounds). GoTo Computerized Mount