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[greealilee]

Can anyone advise if I am doing the right thing. I have been using my celestron 8 SE for the past 3 years for mainly visual use and have since slowly moved in to astro photography. I upgraded the mount to the AVX, bought the polemaster for better alignment and then bought the Starlight Xpress Ultra C camera with the mind set to start to image with this camera and then later down the line upgrade the camera and then be left with this and a good guide camera. So slowly I feel that I have progressed in the right direction and have been on a 3 year learning curve that never seems to ends and only gets steeper, which is what keeps me striving to learn more and upgrade my kit. So my 8 SE is looking to be upgraded but for what?. I am toying with the idea of a Skywatcher Esprit 80 ED APO PRO Triplet Refactor, it fits my budget and I am looking for something a little smaller and more manageable as in size. But with so many on the market could I squeeze out a little more on size but go with a lesser quality, I'm not sure so advise would be great and am I doing the right thing.

[newbie alert]

As with you i started with a 8sct, and then progressed more onto dso's and found the sct too narrow in fov for the bigger targets so got myself a 80ed..its opened up a whole new avenue to imaging but I still love to image the smaller targets with my sct..So now I'm looking to get better at imaging a long focal length  scope ,so now the journey continues...

[greealilee]

So how do you find 80ed, I feel a little guilty going down to such a size.