just need to learn the tools and start off with the basics and don’t go out and buy everything at once! (Will result in not knowing where to start and what to tweak etc!) But personally having done both, the 8se is the only scope I will need for a very long time and love it and yes, DSO imaging is perfectly good on a stock Mount. Downside is for the price of all this (about £3500) you can get an 80mm ed refractor and something like a skywatcher eq Mount which will be much easier to get started with and weigh in about £1500 with a good entry level image sensor and inexpensive guide cam.
#CELESTRON NEXTAR 8SE PLUS#
Other plus of lots of shorter images is should one have a satellite trail through it or a plane fly over you can discard the affected image and stack the rest vs the 3-4 min subs taken with a dslr etc will just be ruined. Advantage of all that aperture is you don’t need to take 2-3 minute images (subs) and an expensive GErman equatorial Mount required of smaller scopes.
#CELESTRON NEXTAR 8SE PRO#
I use sharpcap pro for image capture and for DSO (deep space objects) and with the 8 inch aperture and reducer, typically capture about 10 minutes of 20-30 second Exposures and live stack them. Have managed to get some fantastic deep space images of galaxies, nebula, clusters etc. For the imaging camera I use an Altair 385c camera on the diagonal with a celestron 0.6 reducer (increases field of view and decreases exposure times). Setup is: stock tripod and Celestron wedge, starsense auto align (has a really good polar alignment tool) and for the guide scope an Altair 60mm guide scope and Altair 290m Astro cam which uses phd and ascom to guide the mount. I use an 8se for Astro photography and auto guiding on a stock mount and works well. Start with an APO refractor to learn the ropes, then either an SCT or a RASA once you know what you want to do. If deep sky is your thing, get a good mount first, at least something like a Celestron CGEM (or a SkyWatcher EQ6-R) if you plan on using a C8 OTA on it later. Finally slow optics (f/10, f/6.3 with a reducer) require longer exposures in turn making the tracking issue even worse. The longer the focal length, the higher the demands on the mount and on the imager to know what he is doing wrt tuning the mount. Many targets are quite big and fit into a 400-800mm focal length field of view when pared with an average size sensor. Stability and rigidity of the SE mount are also lacking.įinally the optics are fine but certainly for a beginner in deep sky AP the focal length is much too great. Autoguiding (which is the small scope thing you saw) tries to correct for tracking errors but it also requires greater quality of mount than visual (particularly gear backlash is problem) to work well. The SE, even on a wedge is not build up to those specs. An equatorial mount, either a GEM or a fork mount on a wedge can compensate for this, but alt-az cannot (without an expensive field-derotator which I haven't seen available to amateurs)Įven a tracking equatorial mount also needs good accuracy for minutes-long exposures. Now for deep sky astrophotography that is another matter, and generally the 8 SE is in almost every regard the wrong tool to use.įor deep sky you want a mount that rotates with the earth. The 8SE is fine scope for planetary work also due to the long focal length. First of all, for lunar and planetary AP none of what follows matters, the SE tracks fine enough for the fraction of a second those exposures last (ideally you are pushing 100+ FPS with a planetary CMOS camera to beat the seeing).