I recently purchased my first scope - a Celestron Nexstar 102SLT. If you have the scope properly aligned you can slew to any object in the sky, centre it in the eyepiece, select identify mode on the hand controller and it will tell you what you are looking at and give some info on it and the surrounding objects. Given that we haven't had many clear skies since I got the scope (only one) I haven't had much of a chance to test it out but given that you get this feature with all Nexstar scopes it seems like a better investment to buy a scope that you can explore with and get the info on what you are looking at all rolled in to one.
  