Review on Explore The Night Skies With The Orion SkyQuest XT8 Classic Dobsonian Telescope by John Iverson

I wanted to get a good "bang for my buck" starter scope, and I kept seeing the XT8 and I've read the reviews of it and was impressed so I bought it. The Telescope Arrived around a week later and I carried it inside, I noticed there was a big hole in the box, that's not good so I snapped some pictures of the box and took the telescope out, there was a giant dent in it, oh boy I thought. I snapped some pictures of the dent as well and figured I might as well try it before I contact customer support so after around an hour I finished assembling it, then waited for a non-cloudy day and Wow! This scope is amazing, the dent didn't affect it's performance. I wish I could recreate the moment where I first took it out and took off the cap and pointed it at a random pitch black part of the sky and saw dozens of stars in crisp clarity. I've seen Jupiter and the 4 moons, the Moon is astonishing, I warn you that with out a filter it hurts your eyes but its so amazing you wont be able to look away, I haven't been able to see any other planets due to where I live and the season, but I have seen some deep space objects as well. The first few nights of viewing had some light clouds and humidity and such preventing me from finding Andromeda but on a cold clear night I managed to find it and it's quite amazing, a very defined yellow blob, with 2 other blobs in the vicinity, I was also able to observe the Ring Nebula and I could see it's structure clearly.Now onto the customer service, I emailed and received a reply quite quickly, it didn't sound like Orion wanted to replace my damaged telescope tube until I sent them the high quality pictures I snapped of the packaging and the dent, after that I received a reply stating that my new and undamaged tube is already on the way (I've received it by now and it's great).Overall a great experience here and I recommend this telescope to anyone wanting a really good beginner or even pro telescope.