Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Great replacement for the eyepiece - affordable, lot of bang for the buck. I'm using this with a Celestron Nexstar 6SE If you're reading this review and trying to decide on this eyepiece then, you're probably, like me, a bit of a newbie in learning about this, so here's what my experience was like with this. The telescope tube (optical tube assembly, or OTA) collects light from the sky and creates an image that you can explore with the eyepiece. The magnification of what you're seeing in the sky is easy to calculate by taking OTA length / eyepiece length. My 6SE (1500mm focal length) came with a standard 25mm eyepiece, so 1500/25mm = 60x magnification. This zoom eyepiece starts at 24mm, which is nearly identical magnification (62x) and zooms to 8mm, or 187x (3x greater magnification). But you're just doing an optical enlargement of a section of the image that was created by the OTA, so the image you'll then observe *is* larger, but it will also appear a lot darker, you'll start to quickly realize that you don't have suitable optics to easily focus and get a nice crisp image, and I find I start to notice the slight vibration that I introduce to the telescope when my head touches the eyepiece. I sometimes use this zoom eyepiece with the similarly priced Celestron Barlow extender and I like that combination and am able to explore more, but it's just thinking through what this can and can't do. I've included two pictures simply taken with my phone peeping through the eyepiece looking at Jupiter at 24mm (zoomed out) and 8mm (zoomed in) to give a sense of the magnification. This doesn't give any sense of the image quality or crispness.