Picked up my new Nextstar 8 SE yesterday
Assembly was a breeze, except 2 problems with the red dot starfinder. I had pulled out the plastic protection strip from the battery compartment per the instructions, but could only get it to function by pressing on the battery compartment cover. Eventually I discovered a tiny and very thin film of plastic had been stripped off the plastic strip by the contact spring and was preventing proper battery contact. Doh!
Also had a problem aligning the finder with the OTA because there didn't seem to be enough adjustment on the alt / az alignment screws. Eventually I got it, but the alt screw is at the limit of its movement.
I set up and did a sky align on 3 stars, and this locked in at first attempt. Picked M15 as a go-to target, drives whirred, scope slewed - and there it was, dead centre of eyepiece at 81x. Tried again with 47 Tuc, M4, M29, NGC253 and a few selected stars - dead centre each time. Fantastic
Drive noise is quite high during high speed slewing, but barely audible at slow speeds and while tracking.
Didn't actually get to do much observation, since this was a "driving lesson", and there was a lot of passing cloud, but 47 Tuc had central mass stars beautifully resolved at 64x, and other stars I briefly looked at were pinpoint sharp. Hope for another run tonight to get a feel for the optical performance.
There is one puzzle - there was a double ended spanner included with the accessories but no mention of what this is for in the manual.
Very happy so far
