Cosmic Geoff

The video about the 7" Meade Maksutov makes sense. The counterweight counterbalances the heavy meniscus, allows the back end of the scope to clear the base of the fork. If you are mounting a SCT (with thin corrector plate) or are mounting a Mak on some other sort of mount, no counterweight is necessary.

There is no such thing as an 'all-rounder' telescope - it's as futile as trying to buy an 'all-rounder' motor-car' that's good for circuit racing, fetching the shopping and driving up hillside tracks. You could put together a deep space astrophotography rig with a budget of £1000 if you buy wisely second-hand, but don't expect it to be ideal as a grab'n go to keep the kids interested. Kids will probably prefer something they can use themselves, i.e. a refractor ('looks like a telescope') on a manual mount. Even some grown adults are defeated by the challenge of getting a HEQ5 to work. Dobsonians always get a vote here, but are good for quick deployment, not good for imaging anything. If you are interested in planetary imaging, that again has somewhat different hardware requirements.

Sounds like a social media story. 🙂 I have seen a 16" fork-mounted LX200 in action. No sign of any extra counterweight there. My CPC800 (fork-mounted) does not have extra counterweight either. There is no need for one if the attachments are put in a suitable place. The mirror makes the OTA back-heavy anyway.

I think having just one setup would be restrictive. I have used: 102mm f5 Startravel achromat + ASI224MC +EQ-5 Synscan for wider fields CPC800 8"SCT (alt-az) + f6.3 reducer + ASI224MC for larger image scale. Image rotation? I have some images taken with the CPC800 which show how live stacking compensates for the image rotation. A larger chip (and more expensive) camera might be desirable, but could expose the deficiencies of the Startravel scope.

A steal at £80. I have used the smaller Startravel 102 extensively for EAA imaging. It works well enough that I don't want to spend £1000 or so on an APO to see if it's significantly better.

Hope you get on with that combo. Nothing wrong with either the scope or the mount. The Synscan GoTo may be a steep learning curve...

I have made extensive use of a similar setup. You can dispense with the Barlow lens as the camera chip gives a rather small FOV even without one. You will probably need either an extension tube or a star diagonal. I use a helical focuser as an extender + fine focuser, though the focus is not as fine as I'd like. And if you want natural colour you want an UV/IR cut filter. ZWO offer one for about £24. There are several ways of attaching the camera to things (T2, 2", 1.25") but if you use 1.25" it is easier to swap things over to perform a GoTo alignment. Use a pencil to mark the various focus points on the focuser tube. I suggest you mount it on the EQ5 GoTo in your signature. If you incorporate plate-solving in your setup, that will avoid a great deal of aggro when pursuing fainter objects.

The more expensive Celestron SCT outfits do not seem to hold their price well, and even a recent one may fetch half the price of new. This points to an upper limit of around £1400. If there is any problem with the mount, which clearly is not the later CPC model, then the mount can be discounted and the value of the optical-tube-assembly could be around £950. Does the GPS still work? There has been an issue with the GPS becoming date-expired, requiring a firmware update. As a guide, I bought a new-looking CPC800 (a related model) for half the price of new, and got a box full of accessories included.

Almost certainly unrealistic. I have taken a telescope to my local club's open evenings and found that the un-initiated are most enthused by views of Jupiter and Saturn rather than deep sky objects. I bought a supermarket 70x700 refractor in your price range a while ago but the performance was sub-standard. Got £20 when I sold it. The public were suitably impressed by views of Jupiter and Saturn through my 102mm Startravel with AZ-4 mount (around £400 at today's prices) and my 127mm Mak with SLT mount (around £600 at today's prices). You can spend less but only if compromises are made, mainly in the direction of the cheapest telescope design (Newtonian) and cheapest mount (Dobsonian mount made of chip-board).

Fedele's images for the same event do show the transiting moon very faintly:

Or the tripod legs do not all extend to the same angle. I recall reading complaints about this, as a result of manufacturing defects in the leg/head area.

Here is a sequence of images I took of part of the Io transit. I was interested in a phenomenon I have noted previously - the moon looks bright against dark sky, bright over the planet's limb, but totally disappears by the time the shadow appears. I don't make any great claims for the imaging - rather it demonstrates how well this current hardware and software configuration performs under adverse conditions - the seeing looked poor, the sky was full of thin cloud, and the extinction, as indicated by lengthened exposure time, was around 66% to 80%. CPC800, ASI462MC, ADC, 5000 frames, 30% processed in Autostakkert, sharpened in Registax.

In a borrowed copy of the BAA Journal, I found a review of "Planetary Astronomy - Observing, imaging and studying the planets" by Christophe Pellier (ed.) It looks good, but expensive. After searching for a used copy on Alibris, Abebooks and Amazon in vain I found it was only available direct from the publisher Axilone at planetary-imaging.com for 59 Euros. Since it is over £18, one would have to anticipate duty and collection charges on top of that. Has anybody seen this book?

If you have no idea what you want to do with the scope, you should buy a 'beginner' model. If you are worried about the weight of an 8" Dobsonian, instead of worrying, go out to your garage and make up a long bundle of whatever comes to hand (boxes, bricks etc.) weighing 20 lbs, and a squarish box weighing 20lbs, - the typical weight of a 8" Dob + base, and see how you manage carrying these around. A fit adult should manage these weights OK.

In plain English, you would be using the telescope as a huge camera lens, in place of the Nikon camera lens. I think you are about to discover that the SE mount is of little use for imaging, other than planetary. And a DSLR is less than ideal for planetary imaging.

You first need to decide what you want the telescope to do. Once you know what you do or don't want to do with it, the choice will become much easier.

The number of frames is OK. You could reduce the ROI and try increasing the gain - I don't know if 76 is high or low for that camera. With my ASI462MC and the smallest ROI, the exposure time is sub 1 ms on Mars. The details of how you do the processing make a lot of difference.

Depends on what kind of camera you hope to attach, and what is exposed when you remove the scope's diagonal. In principle, you need a ?? to camera adaptor, and you'd remove the lens of a DSLR. Given the telescope model, some might question whether it's worth the effort. Try holding a smartphone to the eyepiece instead.

Considering that completing the C6 outfit could cost you a substantial amount of money, you could try 'leaning' on your grandfather's 'friends' to return to you a mount, eyepieces and diagonal. You might even have a case in law, depending on the exact circumstances.

The telescope is a C6 SCT. You have the optical tube assembly (OTA) and to make it usable you need a 1.25" diagonal, an eyepiece (or preferably a set of three eyepieces of differing focal lengths), and a mount. The choice of mounts is as wide as the sky. This OTA was sold bundled with a SE mount, or an Evolution mount, (which cannot normally be bought separately) or an AVX mount (available separately). Note that all of these are GoTo mounts. It also seems to be available on a lightweight GoTo mount and a manual + platesolving setup (the Starsense app) none of them available separately. The OTA could go on a variety of Sky-watcher mounts. I'd suggest the widely available Eq-5 Synscan GoTo mount. It could also go on a manual AZ-4 Skywatcher mount. (I have successfully used a 127mm Mak of the same focal length + AZ-4). Note that the prices of some of these mounts may come as a nasty shock. I would point out though that you will get more out of the OTA, both for visual and for imaging, if you put it on a sturdy GoTo mount.

The ASI462 has a smaller pixel size, which gives a better match to a f10 SCT without using a Barlow lens (the best effective focal length depends on the camera pixel size). I never had good results using a Barlow anyway. A consequence of the smaller pixel size is that planets look bigger on the laptop screen. With the same gain, the ASI462 offers shorter exposures - below 1ms on Mars and around 1ms on Jupiter. The maximum FPS is not greatly increased (USB3). I used to process wholly with Registax, but with the ASI462 this gave rather bad results, and stacking with Autostakkert and final processing with Registax gives a much better result. With the ASI462 it seems necessary to increase the colour saturation in Registax, otherwise the final images can look rather monochrome. It is essential to use an IR-cut filter with the ASI462 to get a correct colour balance. I recommend getting ZWO's IR-pass filter as well, so you can take infrared images. With the ASI224MC, the infrared images were often sharper, but with the ASI462MC I have not so far found that the IR images are any sharper than the OSC. Overall I am satisfied with the ASI462MC and intend to use it for planetary imaging in preference to the ASI224MC.

If it's a new scope, check the packaging. If it's used, ask the seller what he did with the extension tube.

Most people use an astro power tank, or a Celestron LiFePo power tank, or a car starter unit with 12v output (the latter unit is also useful for starting your car). The device you cite may be underpowered for a C8 SE and looks more suited for recharging mobile phones. There was a thread on a similar topic recently, but I cannot find it right now. Also many previous threads.

Maybe you can find some utility to check or refresh the mount firmware, and then the handset firmware. Some older Sky-watcher mounts had non-GoTo handsets that could be swapped for a full GoTo handset.

The listing says this is an imaging scope. For that purpose it would require a substantial GoTo mount costing in the region of £1000. The photo appears to show a large central obstruction.