Very Immature Product

Author's Rating:

Pros: Lowest cost scope of its kind, Sturdy tripod, Quality optics

Cons: Celestron has severe quality control problems with mount, poor quality manufacturing

The Bottom Line: 
Don't waste your time and money. Wait for Celestron to perfect this product or cough up $700 more for a Nexstar GPS or LX200.

Author's Review
I picked the C8SGT because it had a sturdier mount than Celestron's Cxi series. This in combination with an equatorial mount and a sturdy tripod would make it better for astrophotography than say a Cxi or a Meade LXD55. In addition, it was around $750 cheaper than a fork mounted Meade LX200 GPS or Celestron Nexstar GPS. So it seems to be at a "sweet spot" in the capability-price tradespace.

While the optics are the typical high quality Celestron product, the mount is a very immature product. I had to wait for two weeks to get the first scope. Even though it was a brand new product in a sealed box, the mount was beat-up scratched and gouged. Celestron decided to mark the mount's home position with stickers that fall off during shipping. The mount has setting circles that are absolutely useless. There is no way to lock them down to keep them from spinning and losing calibration while the scope operates. The handle on one of the elevation adjustment bolts interferes with the mount if you attempt to adjust the elevation above ~30 degrees.

The mount I brought home from the optics shop didn't work. The computer couldn't control the declination axis. It just kept turning around in a circle forever. This meant that alignment and GOTO capability didn't work. However, it could still track the sky. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out if I was doing something wrong.

I had to wait 3 weeks for a the shop to get in another mount. Of the three brand new mounts they received, one failed to power up, one had the same problem as my first mount and the third one seemed to work. I decided to return the whole scope for a refund and just walk away from the whole situation.

After some questioning the sales person told me that they had lots of problems with this mount and with the Meade LXD55 mounts. It seems that both of these products are built in China. This explains why the price is so low for these products. However, the quality is not up to par with the fork mounts that Celestron and Meade build in California. There aren't many problems with the fork mount products.

What is so disappointing is that 12 years ago I was using a Celestron C8 with the Advanced Astromaster. This was truly in the infancy of consumer computerized scopes. But this thing worked great. Why have they regressed into building junk? How can these companies make such high precision, diffraction limited optics but not be able to make a simple equatorial mount and sturdy tripod?