Cosmic Geoff

I am not familiar with the Meade or its spec but the Edge HD has a built-in field flattener which AFAIK is of more use to advanced astrophotographers than to those who want a scope for visual or for imaging Jupiter. The Evolution mount is very nice and has wifi and a built-in battery - alternatives are the cheaper mount of the SE (not bundled with Edge) and the very stable (and heavy) fork mount of the CPC800, to name just two. The basic C8 SE is a lot cheaper than the Meade. The Starsense is a nice accessory (I have one) and saves some tiresome alignment when you set up. It also has some handy observing lists in the handset. Worth considering especially if the bundle on offer is saving you some of the £300 price. It has to be said that GPS (built into the CPC800) also halves the labour of setup, reducing it to just pointing the scope at a couple of objects and synchronizing. I hope this helps.

I suggest that you find a camera to attach to the scope and run the output to a laptop., and see what you make of the performance and user-friendliness of this arrangement. When I got my first GoTo scope, remote viewing was at the forefront of my mind, but in practice I have not pursued this and do not see it as a useful or desirable objective. Large Newtonians on German equatorial mounts are notoriously user-unfriendly. If the size and user-unfriendliness of your scope and mount are the issue, have you considered changing to something easier to use? Like a SCT on an alt-azimuth mount?

If you have put a f9.8 102mm reftactor on a SLT mount that could be your problem. The SLT mount is designed for short and lightweight OTAs and the pendulum effect of a long OTA (as distinct from its weight) is widely thought to make matters worse.

The two scopes are as different as chalk and cheese. Before buying either, you should take a sheet of A4 paper and write down for each scope: What exactly you intend to observe with it. Which kind of objects? Where you are going to store it. How you intend to get it from store to observing site (in the extreme case you may need a pickup truck for the 16" Dob, for all I know). How you are going to get it mounted up for each session. (As an alternative to the above three, where are you going to site your observatory, what about security for it and what's your observatory budget?) Are there targets you want to image? If so, what kind of kit is used or recommended for these projects? Only the SCT is really suited for imaging anything, and it is best suited for planetary imaging. Somebody mentioned EEVA. You should look into that before buying a BIG scope. I made a couple of experiments and found to my shock that a small cheap telescope & EEVA gear would pick up galaxies just as well as an expensive telescope of twice the aperture without EEVA.

Unfortunately the tripod is on the wobbly side and there is no solution which is not either a lot of work or very expensive. There are various expedients such as weighting the tripod but these are not particularly effective. The tripod will be more stable with the legs left retracted. The telescope has (I assume) a standard dovetail so you could re-mount it on whatever mount you like. I made up a SLT tripod with a spare 'bowl' (you will know what I mean) fitted with wooden legs. It was quite a lot of work, but it is permanently installed in my garden and is definitely more stable than the original. Look on the bright side - this f5 telescope is primarily suited to low power widefield viewing. 🙂

I downloaded your .avi file and tried to process it in Registax6. I could not sharpen it up. I wonder if the image was properly focused. It appears that you used the full frame from the camera and the image scale is quite large. Did you use a Barlow lens? I use only 320x240 pixels on planets (though with a smaller SCT) and I don't use a Barlow lens - the poor seeing here renders it pointless. On the couple of occasions I tried a Barlow lens the level of detail achieved was the same as without it or worse. For Jupiter, my image files are typically 375Mb .ser files containing 5000 frames. Yours was 650mb containing 500 frames - I'm not being critical, just pointing out the difference in technique.

You cannot normally buy these mounts separately. They are only available when somebody has split a kit. You could mount most scopes up to the design weight, but only short SCT-shaped OTAs will clear the mount when aimed at the zenith. The mount is designed to fit a Celestron tripod. They will *probably* fit straight onto the heavy duty tripod used with the CPC800 or IIRC, the C9.25 Possible alternative mounts: one of the ioptrons, or Sky-watcher's AZEQ mounts What do you intend to do with it, bearing in mind that it's an Alt-Az mount intended for visual, or maybe planetary imaging?

An ADC is essential for serious results. If you keep trying, you will get feel for the influence of the seeing at your location. You could post some raw frames so we see what you have to contend with (see my recent images in the Planetary Imaging section). AFAIK the Neximage 5 isn't that bad a camera - it used to cost as much or more than the popular ASI120MC - so I would hold off on an upgrade till you sort the basics. I am quite sure it is capable of much better than shown above. There is a lot of black around your images above - if you narrow the frame down while shooting so that you get the planet and not too much else, you will increase the frame rate potentially capturing sharper detail, and waste less disc space.

You do not say which Mak this is, or whether the contamination is on the inside or the outside. Unless extreme, the contamination should not affect the view at all. So my general advice is that you should do nothing. Why are you using a Barlow? Maks have long focal ratios, so the maximum useful magnification can be reached without one

If it's what you want then grab it quick and stop looking a gift horse in the mouth. It's a steal at that price. It's a great scope for general observing and for planetary imaging, and the mount is exceptionally stable (in contrast to the C8 SE which has the same OTA). Guide price for an as-new scope is 66% of the new price. I bought a similar CPC800 a few months ago and have not regretted the purchase. I didn't haggle over the price asked... Just be aware that the fork/OTA assembly weighs over 20Kg and you need to be able-bodied to carry it & get it on the tripod. Depending on how you store it, it can take a bit of time to get it all assembled ready to use. Definitely not grab'n go. As for the Goto setup, it has GPS which in contrast to some systems makes it really easy to setup - just turn it on and align it with a couple of stars or a planet.

I didn't realize you had a physical problem - if it had been clear from your post I would not have commented. Apologies.

I am a little surprised that you would need an elaborate hoist for mounting an 8" Newt. Mine weights ~10 Kg and I did not find it too much to handle last time I used it. The very first thing I did with the OTA on acquiring it was to fix a bar across the tube rings on the opposite side from the dovetail. The bar and dovetail act as carry handles. With the OTA propped in position on the clamp I can hold it in position with the handle/bar while doing up the clamp with the other hand. All scopes bigger than 4" should have a handle, or an accessory bar that doubles as a handle.

I have a Sky-watcher x2 Barlow that I got with my Startravel OTA. It is highly unlikely to be the best Barlow in the world (some retailers offer a similar one for 25 pounds) but I have used it for planetary observing with the Startravel and, with a binoviewer on a couple of my other scopes, and not seen anything obviously wrong with it.

As I wrote, upgrading the eyepieces first will improve planetary views. A Barlow will be more useful for planets and double stars. Other deep-space targets may require lower power or widefield eyepieces.

Too right. The eyepieces bundled with scope kits are often very poor (especially those of ~10mm) and they should be the first target for replacement. To put this into context, the whole outfit was on sale for £149.99, the cost of three decent eyepieces, and apparently came with a 20mm erecting eyepiece (shudder) and a 10mm, but no Barlow. "The supplied eyepieces are cheap, and ok to begin with, but your viewing experience will benefit from some Celestron Plossl's, and a Barlow." - reviewer on FLO. A Powermate would apparently cost about as much as the whole scope outfit did in the first place.

I was assuming that you would be using the HEQ5, which is obviously more stable than the 8SE Nexstar mount. I chose the CPC800 over a HEQ5 Synscan or suchlike mounts on the grounds that it would be easier to set up in the early hours of the morning (no polar aligning required). I tried the original C8 on a EQ-5 and it was okay but I didn't like the polar aligning and other fiddling about required to use it.

An able-bodied person could pick up a complete C8 SE and carry it through a doorway (with the tripod legs retraced, obviously). This is what I used to do with my C8 SE until recently - just carry it outside, set it down and turn on the Starsense accessory. If you have to carry it down stairs I would definitely not advise carrying the whole thing, for safety reasons, but the C8 SE easily splits into two parts - OTA+mount head, and the tripod. If carrying the scope, mount etc in one go is a requirement, then you really want either a tabletop mini-Dob, or a small setup based on a Maksutov or SCT that you can disassemble into a backpack or carry case. I think we already had a thread discussion where the OP wanted to observe from a roof. Transit cases are available for the C8 - not sure about the tripod as well, but if you are thinking of going this route it might be wise to get a suitcase from a junkshop, add some bricks to the indicated weight and have a dummy run up and down those stairs.🙂

Condolences. Best of luck with this. You may well find that there is a tradeoff between quick sale/marketing effort. A used telescope dealer might take away all of it as a job lot, but is unlikely to give you a good price. To realize the best price you will have to identify everything and package it into attractive lots e.g. the same collection of bits that come in the box if you bought that telescope new, and in working order. For this you will obviously need on-site help from somebody who knows about this stuff. Maybe there is an astro club near you who can help out? As someone who has both bought and sold (or tried to sell) used kit I would comment that you should be prepared for some items to be slow to sell or to fetch less than the guidelines indicated above. A few months ago I bought a high-end telescope in excellent condition plus a boxful of valuable accessories for what in retrospect seems like embarrassingly little money. That seems to happen with some telescope models. Previously I got a scruffy telescope outfit from a dealer for about half the price of a new one. (It still works okay). A few years ago I put a 70mm refractor on ebay at a starting price of £25, collection only. I got £25 less fees for it. I am trying to sell a Newtonian OTA but there has bee almost no interest so far. If you have accessories, you will find that buyers will be happy to take a box of accessories along with the telescope & mount but may not be prepared to pay much extra for them. You might get more cataloguing them individually but that could entail a lot of work.

In my head is a ADC a pointless task using a mono camera as you're shooting in 1 wavelength at a time in mono...with a colour camera I can understand.. Not necessarily. If you are using three colour filters in turn to record colour, you are not recording one wavelength but a band of wavelengths. So there will still be some dispersion, which the use of an ADC will eliminate. It's like shifting the red and blue in post-processing vs using an ADC when imaging with a colour camera.

The focal length of your scope is close to that of my C8 SCTs (~2000mm). I found that focusing the C8 for visual was not difficult, but when focusing for planetary imaging it bounces around a lot on the SE mount. The imaging-class CPC800 mount is far more stable and focusing by hand is not a problem. It was stable enough for me to see what this mirror shift thing meant - not a problem either. The mount in your picture looks rather small. If you are considering imaging, you might consider upgrading to a heavier mount, e.g. a HEQ5, for extra stability. The planetary processing software will compensate for a wobbly mount, but it is much less trying all round if you mount is stable. No doubt somebody can advise you on adapters to fit a Crayford or helical focuser to the back of your scope. For my Newtonian I got a Chinese helical focuser (designed for guidescopes) for about £20 and it screwed into the bigger part of the 2"/1.25" adapter.

When I was using my C8 SE for planetary imaging I felt that an electric focuser would be nice as it wobbled around so much when I touched it. I changed to a CPC800 which has the same model C8 OTA on a heavier mount, and it does not move much when I grab the focuser knob, so I don't feel the need for an electric focuser, Other folks' opinions may vary.

I found a range of lever settings that worked for me (I think I initially tried it out on a low-altitude star) and since I am mostly working with planets at 10 to 15 deg. altitude I just adjust them a bit as required. Levers set at 1.5 to 2 divisions from the white knob. That graph says it all.

I agree with the advice that a manual alt-az would be much simpler to manage. An equatorial mount is a liability for a beginner who just wants to look at objects for brief periods of time. A cautionary note on astrophotography - this will essentially require you to re-equip after buying and trying the telescope you discuss above. Some newbies may imagine that to get into astrophotography, one just has to strap a DSLR onto an entry-level telescope. I'm sorry, but you just can't. These entry level telescope tubes are not well suited to astrophotography - they are not optimized for it, and as for the mounts ... to take impressive deep-space images it is usually necessary to automatically track the target with pinpoint accuracy for a very long time. Entry level mounts are generally about as suitable for this as a family runabout is for Formula 1. There are cheaper options, such as placing a DSLR directly on a small tracking mount. For planetary imaging, which works in a different way, the demands on the mount are less extreme, and it is possible to get results with simpler mounts, but an imaging-class mount makes the whole process more pleasant and productive. A 130mm scope is capable of producing some sort of planetary images, but it might need to be camera modified, and you would need to expensively re-mount it to make it usable. A look at what ace planetary imagers like Astroavani actually use may prove instructive. This is not to say that you shouldn't have a go, but the temptation to get better kit in pursuit of more impressive images could prove expensive.

There is a knack to getting an image on screen, as I discovered when I started planetary imaging. It's best to practice on the Moon, which is bright and hard to miss. 😦 Gotcha 1 is that unless an object like Saturn is almost in focus, it will not show up on screen no matter what you do. The camera focus position will be significantly different from the eyepiece focus (typically several mm further in) and you have to find out what that difference is with your setup. The trick I used is to focus the eyepiece with the eyepiece pulled up by the appropriate distance, and then replace it with the camera, whereupon I can at least find something blurry. I always image with the diagonal - it's less of a bother and you just tick a box in processing to correct the image. Gotcha 2 is that the sensor chip is small and the planet image can wander off it. Here is where you need a well-behaved tracking mount, and at minimum a 9x50 optical finder, accurately aligned. If you dislike neck-ache you may want to have a RACI finder, and if you have dark skies rather than urban glow, illuminated crosshairs. You will probably want to image with 320x240 or 480x480 but it is almost impossible to get a subject on this without going to the full chip size to find the subject. and centre it.

With any Goto system, one celestial object is enough for alignment provided that the mount is accurately leveled. I can only speak for the Celestron version as regards how to go about it - start with mount leveled and scope pointed at random, enter date, time, location, select solar system object, traverse to it, coarse and fine align, job done! I suspect that the Synscan is not so simple, and you may have less of a fight with it if you start with it crudely indexed in a northerly direction. If in doubt, RTFM 🙂