Absolute newbie

[Ian_A]

Evening all. I had a Skywatcher 200 some years ago on EQ mount and played with a modified webcam with not much success.  I sold the whole lot about 5 years ago. I’m about to buy a second hand Celestron C80 with EQ mount, not go to, or motorised.

sorry for my ignorance in advance.....I know I’ll need to motorised it at some point, and I’ve seen tracking scopes used to track a pixel fir the camera scope etc, way past my possible investment at the moment ( house mods first ).

i was hoping to do Jupiter and Saturn maybe, possibly mars if available. Your assumption that I know nothing will be correct haha. I’ve seen the Celestron NexImage 10, first question is would this be ok/compatible with the C80ED?

if I try to track manually what are the problems and what success can I expect?

i assume I only need to motorise one knob, once I set the height I recall I only needed to turn one knob to track ! Please enlighten me on what the correct terms are for these knobs 

ill leave it there for now....so many questions sorry.

 

cheers

Ian

[astrosathya]

Hi Ian, 

Welcome back to the hobby. The C80 is a refractor of 80mm aperture. Infact its sisters are the Orion 80ED and Sky-Watcher ED80. These are good for deep sky imaging, when coupled with an 0.8x reducer/flattener, but when it comes to imaging planets like Jupiter and Saturn you need resolution, like that of a Celestron 8" SCT. If planetary imaging is your cup of tea, then go for an SCT. This C80 wont be much use, even with a Barlow because resolution is directly proportional to aperture.

[Owmuchonomy]

Hi Ian, if you want to image planets there are several key things. Firstly, focal length. The image scale in the C80 will be far too small for the usual planetary cameras. An SCT or Mak are the scopes of choice. For example I use a 9.25” SCT at a focal length of between 2.3 and over 5 metres. Secondly, and particularly from your latitude the planets are very low in the sky. This introduces the challenge of overcoming atmospheric distortion and you will need a corrector for this called ADC for short. Thirdly you need a fast frame rate planetary camera of which there are many choices. Because a technique called ‘lucky imaging’ is often used it is best to take short video files containing lots of frames. In this scenario tracking becomes less important so a basic tracking mount is fine. If you have a steady hand it can be done manually! The video files may be 30 seconds or a couple of minutes in length depending upon the target and contain up to a few thousand files. There is a planetary imaging section on this forum that is worth checking out. Also, check the web for tutorials on Lucky Imaging of planets, the Moon and the Sun.

If you have planetarium software then you can check how the planets are positioned over the next few years. Other than Mars in 2020 it’s not great news I’m afraid.

examples of my results are in my weblink in the signature below.

[PeterCPC]

If you click on the Resources Tab at the top and field of View calculator /imaging mode you can see what to expect with that set up - not good I'm afraid.

Peter