Celestron Neximage?????

[M4lcs67]

With the demise of the Phillips webcams, does anyone have an opinion on the Neximage? Had looked at a modified Microsoft HD, but the Celestron one seems to be a fully dedicated one with it's primary job being astro related, not one that has been cobbled together from assorted parts.

Thanks

[David JM]

I have a NexImage, there is about to be another one released and the 'current' NexImage is no longer supplied to shops.

The new one is £100-ish more expensive. The current one runs AMCAP software which can be adjusted for all objects from the Sun to Saturn but not for objects that are dimmer or further out. It will pick up the moons of Jupiter and Titan.

I find it half good and half a pain in the neck. The 1.25" fitting that should plug into the 'scope is more like 1.2" so you need to centre the object you want to image in the highest magnification you have to hand before fitting the NexImage.

With the AMCAP on 'full auto' you should then see a donut to the [depending on 'scope] lower right of the screen. You will need to refocus. I think the imager has a focal length of around 5mm, so you can work out the magnifiacation. For higher magnifications I use a Barlow. This requires recentring the image, putting the Barlow in place, swearing, refocusing and hopefully getting the image-once you have found it again.

I would love to use the barrel from one of my eyepieces with the imager but the threads are homo-astronomical rather than hetro-astronomical, so I can't use the female threaded eyepiece barrel on the female threaded imager.

Adding a filter is easy as the NexImage barrel is threaded all the way down, BUT the filter is likely to be 1.25" and will throw off the object a bit. There is also a 0.5x focal reducer available for the NexImage.

All my whinging aside, the following shots are from a NexImage and a NexStar 4SE with AMCAP and RegiStax 2.X The moon one is a mosaic of around 40 frames.