Celestron C80-EDR GT

[richiebragg]

Hi, I'm a total newcomer to astronomy, had an interest after visiting the observatories in Hawaii last year and the BBC's stargazing program made me put my hand in my pocket. I picked up a Celestron C80-EDR GT for a good price and started to have a play round with the computer control capabilities to get everything working, now I'm just waiting for a clear night.... I was wondering what I would be best looking at with this scope as a beginner, I have a Sony A200 and a spc900 webcam to try out with the scope but would like to see some good images, just wondering what to aim for... I also have 5 & 20mm eyepieces and a 2 x Barlow

Secondly, I'm having some problems with the CG5-GT mount (apart from the noise), it often struggles to slew left and right using the controller or pc. I took it apart and found that the motor drive gear is nit always in contact with the worm drive gear, it's nothing that a wedge and some stakeout won't sort out but I was just wondering if any1 else has had similar problems with the mount?

[jgs001]

I can't help with the mount, but I've been using that scope for a while, and it's a cracker. It's great for widefield deep sky with an SLR, and can be used for decent lunar with the 2x barlow (mosaicing is fun..) it can produce quite nice results at reasonable scale, on the planets, but that is far tougher to do.

Use either camera at prime focus (attached to the scope) but you'll want at least a 50mm extension tube

Adaptors - Two-inch Focus Extension tubes

I've found that for the webcam, I need to move the camera even further out with more tubes, but I use 1.25" tubes for that.