yeh really….well just test one out…

Yes, it is fine. It is easy to get carried away by magnification figures but for hand held binos high power is pointless since you will never hold them steady enough for a good view. Distance is irrelevant in astronomy since effectively everything is at infinite distance. In any case that is a matter of focal setting not zoom.

Finally, all but the very highest end (several hundred dollars) zoom binos introduce significant optical defects. These exist even at low power.

Like $ says, test one out. Try before buying. See what the return policy is for whatever company your purchasing the binos from is. When you get the binos, look at a brick wall and see how distorted the mortar lines look from 100 yards away. Lacking a brick wall, use a newspaper and go back far enough that you can read the text with the binos.

If the lines and words look distorted (barrel, pinched, rounded shaped), then those aren’t any good and return them for something else.

http://www.cloudynights.com/ubbthreads/showthreaded.php/Cat/1,2,3,4,5,8,9,10/Number/311914/page/0/view/collapsed/sb/5/o/all/vc/1
http://www.nightskyinfo.com/binoculars/

As a beginner, you need to trust the advice of experienced astronomers like myself. The only binocular I use regularly is a 10×50. Zoom binoculars are very poor optically compared to single magnifications. There’s no reason to have zoom magnification (continuously variable). When you want less than 10x, you use your eyes. When you want to use more than 10x, you use a telescope. That’s why I use one binocular and half a dozen telescopes: each has its own specialized purpose.

A 10×50 is as good as you can get for normal binoculars.
You can get astro binoculars much bigger but they are no good without a proper mount and they are uncomfortable to use on normal tripods because they are much shorter than telescopes and the tripod head just gets in the way at high elevations, so you get a binocular mount which is expensive to buy, or you make one.
Here are some typical parallelogram ones for astronomy.
Sitting down time. Don’t faint.
http://www.bigbinoculars.com/pmounts.htm . . . .
10x50s are much more practical and will give you great views of the sky and they are excellent for birdwatching. They do quite well when it’s dusk, when a lot of birders are looking out for birds flying home or getting settled for the night.
Here’s the stuff about image brightness by day or night, magnification,etc. see the list of myths on the right. Coatings are very good these days so the argument against them in the link really is out of date, but all the other myths are explained very well.
http://www.birdwatching.com/optics/myths2006-9.html . . . . .
This is a very good site for explaining everything in a simple but accurate manner…everything you need to know
http://www.aoe.com.au/binocular_guide.html . . . . .
Finally, before spending loads on those Nikons, have a look at some Helios 10×50 for half the price and see if you can find any difference in the quality of the images.
We all see with our own eyes.
However good the sound from a loudspeaker is if you’re hearing is bad the speakers just won’t sound their best to you. Obvious.
It’s the same with binoculars. Leitz and Swarovski may give brilliant sharpness but can you see it?
At 10x you’ll have a job seeing anything like as good as the image is in the finest binoculars because the level of sharpness is greater than the eye can see.
The lenses are that good.
One benefit you get with nearly all the top ones is a flatter field right out to the edge, but we don’t see the whole field at once anyway. We can’t see 50-60 degrees wide as most binocular fields are and see it all sharp at the same time whether we’re looking straight out of our eyes or through a telescope or binoculars. The eye wanders round the field to see all there is, with or without using binoculars.
Try it.
Look at the wallpaper or the view from the window and actually notice how much of it is sharp when you stare straight in front of you. We see it all sharp when we’re not conscious of our eyes’ workings because our eyes are wandering all over the place.. When we see something interesting towards the side of our vision we turn to look at it better, to get a sharp view.
It’s the same when you look through an eyepiece. Your eye wanders over the field, not seeing it all sharp at the same time though we get a general impression of sharpness or curvature in the whole field.
Tiny changes of focus are all you need to compensate for a curved field in most cases and it becomes automatic with one finger on the focusing wheel anyway, so save the money.
Mostly we just move the binos a bit to centalise the bit of something interesting we noticed towards the edge of the field, just as we turn our heads to see things more sharply in day to day looking at things.
You pay a lot of money for that extra sharpness and flat field……
Many cheaper binoculars are not far behind in practice, and some of them are just as good for practical use as the top drawer stuff costing hundreds of dollars or pounds, that you’ll leave behind more often than not for fear of spoiling them.
I have Helios 7×50 and 10×50, a Meade 15×70, a 20×80,and several other Binos.
Helios 10×50 are the ones I take out with me most times.
Helios binoculars also regularly get “Best Buy” in binocular reviews for astronomy and birdwatching.
Scroll down for some decent 10x50s at a good price.
http://www.firstlightoptics.com/products.php?cat=104 . . . . .

Zoom binoculars are just no good for decent viewing.
The image you get won’t be anywhere near as good as in those Nikon binos or the Helios or even much cheaper ones.
Basically, zoom binoculars are crap, unless you want a show-off ornament to boast about.
Better to buy some proper binos and you’ll get much more use out of them.
You’ll soon get fed up with the zoom efforts and get sick of the field narrowing as you zoom in and images that let you actually see more at lower powers because the images at the high end of the zoom are so poor..
10x50s reign supreme for practical binoculars that cover a lot of uses, and good ones needn’t cost a fortune.
Have fun looking.