Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First off, there is nothing easy about using the Celestron Nextar 8. It's complex, frustrating, and fails to deliver on Celestron's marketing promises. For example, the hand controller functions like it was designed and built in 1988. It has a cheap LED display and tedious, needlessly complex & un-intuitive menu operations. One must endure a labyrinth of menus just to set it up. Inconceivably, the controller loses its time setting every time you shut it off. That's just amazingly poor design. They do occasionally update the goto controller firmware, but pray that you don't have to ever do this. Celestron's process is out of the stone age. It requires an antiquated RS-232 cable (think 1970's and 80s cables) to update its firmware. Hello Celestron Engineers - USB has been the primary way to connect to computers since 1996 - it's long past time to adopt it). Celestron also gives the middle finger to Apple customers...apparently they don't want them as customers at all. If you use a Macintosh but need to update your firmware you are out of luck. Same deal for Linux users. Next issue: doing the star alignment should be easy, but it is definitely NOT. Even the customers who like the product admit that it takes a lot of very careful precision to successfully align. The tiniest errors with leveling your mount, entering the time, or lining up the stars in your eyepiece and you'll be stuck in "failed to align" hell. Be prepared to go through the alignment routine many times just to get started, then to repeat the procedure after you frustratingly lose alignment. When I realized I was spending more time aligning than looking at stars I gave up using the go-to feature. Now I just use the direction arrows to manually find objects. My own eye coupled with a handy app on my iPhone is far more effective than Celestron's ineffective go-to software. It's not that hard and kinda fun, but now I am stuck with this expensive go-to mount that is useless that taunts me every time I try to use it with how much money I wasted. The most frustrating part, though, is that once you think the telescope finally IS aligned it actually ISN'T. After alignment I've been able to get it to correctly point to a database object or two, but ask it to move to a third object and you can just forget it...unless you want to go through the 10 minutes of re-leveling and re-aligninging. In my opinion the mount, controller, and software are all junk. The optics are great...when you can get them pointed at the object you want to see. Buyer beware: This is a complex product, apparently built on an old hardware and software technology platform, that is frustrating and disappointing to use. Think about how amazing a go-to telescope would be if Apple or Google designed one. Celestron's product is the opposite of what you just imagined. They can and should do better.