Celestron NexStar 8 SE Follow-Up Review

hey guys this is Simon just bringing you a follow-up review of the celestron next star ase telescope a lot of people when they review products they'll have the product for about two or three months they'll review it or even less amount of time than that they'll review it and they'll never bring you a follow-up review so that's what I want to do today is a follow-up on one of Celeste Ron's best telescopes on the market and it's actually their best-selling telescope so I want to show you how it's done over about four and a half years that I've owned it through extensive use and show you know the pros and the cons and just give you a follow up review on what I like about the telescope what I don't like and some things that I would recommend for it alright so the big question probably is how did the mount hold up over four and half years you know you got the gears everything working and seek to power the telescope that's probably the thing that you would think would go the first so over the years like I said it has extensive use and it still works really really well in fact I've never never regressed it or anything the only issue that I can tell is right as the scope begins to track you can hear the the gears clinch just a little bit but then it goes on tracking just fine so the mount is actually held up remarkably well over the years it's actually pretty impressive how durable it is for an amateur astronomer it is the perfect telescope for an amateur astronomers simply because well it's a Cassegrain it's eight inches what more would you need everyone needs an 8 inch Cassegrain and it's very very durable and reliable you're not going to have to worry about it breaking really on you as as I've put it through extensive use and it's worked just fine for me now obviously if you're watching this video you probably already know this is an 8 inch matte Cassegrain telescope but that's another reason why I love this telescope so much is it as an 8 inch mitt Cassegrain they are amazing telescopes they should be in every astronomers inventory they're lightweight they pick up a ton of photons and you can see a ton of stuff with a Cassegrain all in a really short and small package so if you don't have an 8-inch schmidt-cassegrain that's something I would recommend that everyone has I mean m31 easily visible m11 gives great views and 13 all of your messier objects you can basically see with an 8-inch schmidt-cassegrain from dark skies awesome views of the moon you can put a focal reducer on it and get even wider views I just can't say enough good things about an 8-inch Schmidt Cassegrain telescope this one's been great to me and I've loved it so I no matter what kind of telescopes I have big or small refractors Newtonian z' what not 8-inch mid-calf screen I will always always have an 8-inch Schmidt Cassegrain in my inventory because they are so portable and just such good telescopes for how much they weigh the next Star Plus hand controller has been Celeste Ron's go-to hand controller for quite some time now and it's actually been nice that they made these flash upgradable so I know it's not a huge point that oh you know you can upgrade your hand controller but it's been nice over the years not to have to buy a new one to just be able to stick your rs-232 cable in here connect it to the celestron firmware manager update it and you're good to go with the latest you know updates for your telescope so that's been nice to not have to buy a new one and the hand controls work great no no issues with the LED over the years and that's just a quick run over of the hand control in the mount for you so just to let you listen to the gears here I'm going to going to move it around for you and it pretty much sounds the same way it did on day one which is really like I said it's really impressive altitude and azimuth still sounds really really good so at the beginning of the video and throughout this whole video you may have noticed that I have a guide scope on the telescope and you're probably thinking why do you have a guide scope and an auto guider on a altitude azimuth mount why would you put this orion starshoot in here and there's a good reason for it and I never really realized it even in my first video on this telescope until I just thought about this the other day I was always kind of confused why they had an auto guider port on there as well because if you auto guide you're still going to get some field rotation in your images strictly because it is an altitude azimuth amount well so as I thought about this it hit me that in years past celestron actually made an equatorial wedge for the 8se and so you could actually put the wedge on here and align your telescope equatorially which would allow you to auto guide and I thought oh that's really really neat that they incorporated that into the ASE so you could save a ton of money by not buying an equatorial mount and get a really lightweight astrophotography setup with an auto guider port on it and I thought man that's really awesome unfortunately celestron has discontinued those so I mean you can't buy that particular wedge but now that they came out with the evolution series of telescopes the the wedge for that they actually made it compatible with the six SE and the eight SE so you can now get a wedge for this telescope and you won't have to to buy an equatorial mount and you can still auto guide and get really good Astro photography pictures so I thought that was really really cool that they made the evolution wedge compatible with the NexStar wedge it has really really good ergonomics and the adjustments are really precise so that you don't have to struggle while getting a polar alignment so that's the reason you can put a an auto guider on this guy is you can buy a web for it and I thought that was pretty cool and you can tell the hand controller to auto guide so what are some things that I would recommend to go of this telescope after using it for such a long time well the first thing I would get is a celestron 2 inch XLT star diagonal which allows you to use two inch eyepieces that is a huge upgrade yet it's a little bit more heavy you just need to slide your telescope up a bit to compensate but 2 inch eyepieces will open up your telescope - I don't know just a realm of seeing you can see so much more with two-inch high piece is they're so much easier to observe through and they just look awesome - so Explorer Scientifics a really good brand to go to for two-inch eyepieces they're affordable generally compared to other brands and they make really good 2 inch eyepieces and you can get them from several varying degree ranges you know from 70 degrees to 80 - all the way up to like 120 degrees so - inside pieces are a huge plus for this telescope another huge plus is a focal reducer now focal reducers i've made 2 videos on them and how they work and specifically this celestron one and it's been a great product because it allows you to do astrophotography @f 6.3 so you can bring in a lot more light and when you're doing visual work it allows you to stop down the telescope by a factor of 6.3 as well so you pick up a lot more sky so it just makes observing great when you're not looking at planets so whenever I'm not looking at planets the focal reducers on my telescope and they like I said they're just a critical piece of a telescope so I'd highly recommend 2 inch eyepieces and a focal reducer so over the years what are some things that I really don't like about the telescope there's a few of them and when I say I really don't like them I really don't like them number one the red dot finder really is a piece of crap there's no other way really to to say that any better when you put that on a star and you're trying to get it adjusted to get your telescope and the red dot finder looking at the same place it it basically it runs out of travel the the dot won't move far enough and it's just really low-quality plastic it's just it's really no good at all so I like to use a and you're like a guide scope or you know just a normal finderscope slide it out put the finder scope in and find my star that way makes life so much easier with this telescope all you need to do is just get an Orion schmidt-cassegrain adapter for your mounting buck bar here it's super simple to install takes two minutes you just undo two screws put two new ones in and you have a better finder scope just like that so that's a huge plus right there really terrible really terrible red dot finder another thing that is just really bad is the focuser now you can't expect to have you know an amazing you know Cray furred or something on here right from the start it's it's I mean it's decent but you're never really going to get a crisp focus with it it's really really mushy you don't really get like a crisp clicks or anything like that and it's just not not a very good focus or at all it's just a little squishy the other thing that I really don't like too much is this single fork arm design and it's okay but when you're carrying the telescope on the fork arm sometimes you can wiggle it a little bit and it shifts in the saddle so it's kind of prone to falling out if this isn't done down tight enough so I really like the two fork arm design better like the CPC series that obviously adds weight though number one and number two it's a lot more expensive so it's a good design you just got to really make sure that you don't shift the saddle at all and that you're you're really tight down on your oth that it's not moving but besides that there really isn't too much that's you know not great about it the the star diagonal yeah it's just okay they're not going to send you one you know that's amazing that comes with the telescope the eyepiece is the same way they're not that great but they'll do the job for a while and then you can upgrade those as time goes on but as as the years have gone by the motors have lasted and that's the most important part and the gears and everything have been great and so that makes the telescope really reliable and durable and makes for a happy customer some other minor upgrades that I would recommend are some celestron vibration suppression they have gone up in price since when I purchased them over the years but they actually are really effective and you can use them for multiple telescopes so if you have several telescopes a good pair of vibration suppression pads is nice or you can make your own a dew shield is another really good upgrade that you can get and maybe replace the focuser eventually if you can afford to do so if you're going to do Astro photography I highly highly highly recommend the orion starshoot autoguider it's really simple really easy to use with the this basic package it's just called the mini magnificent auto guider package I believe it comes with a 50 millimeter guide scope and the auto guider and it works really really well so that's a that's something I'd recommend especially if you're using a focal reducer if you're not using a focal reducer you'll want to get a guide scope that's longer in focal length but for this setup it works really nice alright guys well that's my follow-up review the celestron next r8 se as you can see over the years that just held up really well motor still go strong it's an 8 inch Schmidt Cassegrain so and what more could you want i'll basically always have one in my inventory just because they're so portable white and pick up so much light they're really like a do all telesco so i'd highly recommend it they're extremely upgradable you know you can put a Wi-Fi link in here a GPS link power tanks basically you name it you can put it on it and the for the price they're really good telescopes so about 1200 US dollars usually every holiday season they go on sale to about a thousand US dollars including this season I already saw that they went on sale so if you're thinking about picking one up now would be a good time to do so during the holidays and you would be you know wise to do so because they are awesome telescopes there's nothing really bad to say about them over for years and they've lasted really really well so thanks so much for watching and take care

Channel: AstroBlender

Views: 244,588

Rating: 4.87886 out of 5

Keywords: Celestron, 8 SE, Orion, ST-80, Schmidt-Cassegrain, Astronomy, Explore Scientific, Meade, 6 SE, 5 SE, 4 SE, SLT, Evolution

Id: qGW6MKHTrr8

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 22 2016