Issue #541: Taking Pictures with a C8

When I’m speaking about the history of Schmidt Cassegrains at star parties, club meetings, or cons, I often get puzzled looks and questions from new amateurs about one of the things I say: “One of the big reasons for the 8-inch SCTs becoming the most popular commercial telescope in the 70s was astrophotography.” What? Everybody knows SCTs aren’t good for taking long exposure deep sky pictures. For that you need a short focal length refractor, right?

Maybe and maybe not. Firstly, back in the 70s when the Schmidt Cassegrain began its rise to fame, the other common telescope alternatives for deep sky astrophotography were the cumbersome, shaky Newtonians practically everybody owned, and refractors with focal ratios of f/15 or more. Take it from someone who was there, it was a million times easier to take deep sky astrophotos with a C8 than one of those telescopes.

Also, while I won’t disagree that for beginners in astrophotography, a refractor of short focal length is easier to manage in the beginning, we don’t remain beginners forever. Eventually you may discover more focal length, aperture, and resolution than what your 80 – 100mm refractor offers can be a good thing. So what are the problems with using the average Celestron C8 or Meade 8-inch for deep sky imaging?

The first gremlin is simply all that focal length. With a C8, you start out with a native focal length of about 2000mm. That is what, more than anything else, makes long exposures tough with the telescope. At 2000mm, every tracking faux pas your mount commits will be exaggerated. Not as stable as it ought to be? A tiny gust of wind will ruin your picture by creating trailed stars no matter how well you guided. That may make anything but the shortest exposures problematical in autumn and winter when the winds are wont to blow.

Also, if you’re a plebe like me, you won’t be using a 10-thousand-dollar mount for your telescope and will have to guide it. You’ll use a small auxiliary camera to keep the telescope precisely centered on the target despite the inevitable back and forth motion of periodic error caused by less than perfect gears. At 2000mm, you will have to guide precisely. How precise depends on the pixel size and sensor chip size of the imaging camera, but you can bet there won’t be much room for error.

Then there are the mirror flop blues.  To focus, the primary mirror of a Celestron or Meade SCT slides up and down on the baffle tube that protrudes from the main mirror. The mechanical tolerances there are OK for visual use but are loose enough that the mirror can move slightly when the attitude of the telescope changes significantly—as when crossing the Meridian. Result? Those darned trailed stars if you’re using a separate guide telescope for auto-guiding the mount. To the guide camera, everything looked fine, but the image moved in the main camera when the mirror flopped.

An imaging rig back in the day!

None of these things present insuperable difficulties, though. After all, me and my mates were using C8s to take good pictures—which I define as pictures that made us happy—thirty and forty years ago. We didn’t have electronic cameras, either. We manually guided our telescopes and usually exposed for a minimum of half an hour even on bright objects and with “fast” film in our SLRs. If we could get decent shots with a Schmidt Cassegrain then, certainly you can now.

Again, I don’t endorse a C8 or Meade 8 as your first astrographic telescope. Cut your teeth on the vaunted fast ED refractor—they are cheap now and come as close to being foolproof for deep sky imaging as you can get. But when you are ready to move up in focal length and aperture, however, begin collecting the astro-stuff you will need…

Get a Modern SCT

Get an Edge (Celestron) or an ACF (Meade). Their better field edge performance is a good thing, no doubt about that, especially if you also intend to use the scope visually. Admittedly, unless you are employing a camera with a full frame 35mm sensor, you won’t notice the difference in images, but you might as well invest for the future so that if/when you move to a bigger chip you’ll be ready.

The really big deal with modern SCTs for imagers is not necessarily the field edge, but that they have mirror locks. The Celestron Edges have them, and so do the 8-inch Meade ACF telescopes. These locks stabilize the primary mirror and prevent it from flopping if you are guiding with a separate guide scope.

Get a Focal Reducer

All the Meade and Celestron 8-inch SCTs come in at f/10, that 2000mm we talked about above. Not only does that many millimeters make guiding and tracking more difficult, it makes for longer exposures and can be a challenge for accurate goto pointing. The solution? If you get the Celestron, buy the Edge f/7 reducer. If a Meade, the standard Meade f/6.3 reducer corrector (the Celestron 6.3 works fine on Meade scopes too). The Meade and Celestron 6.3 reducers are reducer correctors, designed to flatten the field edge of non-ACF telescopes, but they work just fine with ACFs since most of their effect is to, yes, flatten the field rather than remove coma—which the ACFs’ optical system does itself.

A 66mm f/7 makes a nice guider...

How about other focal reducers? Like those from Optek? They can be a good choice if you’ve got a Meade scope, but some can’t be used visually. Those for the Edge scopes definitely can’t. Only the Celestron f/7 Edge reducer can be used for that. Since you’ll probably want to eyeball the heavens your Edge SCT once in a while, get a reducer that will work with an eyepiece.

Get a Good Enough Mount

This is the most important thing if you’re considering SCT astrophotography: how good is the mount’s tracking? Especially with a payload consisting of an 8-inch SCT, camera, and guide scope (which may be upwards of 30 pounds). It doesn’t matter if you image with a fork mount or a German equatorial—both have their pluses—it just matters that you get good tracking with a tricked out 8-inch SCT onboard.

Can you get by with the fork mount that came with your telescope? Maybe, if it’s of fairly recent vintage. Older forks can be a crapshoot. I once encountered a Meade LX200 GPS with 90” of periodic error (that’s a lot). Modern forks like the CPC Deluxe from Celestron and the fancy LX600 from Meade are certainly much better for imaging than the old ones. HOWEVER, thousands of good long exposure images have been taken with the minimalist AC driven fork mounts of the 70s and 80s. Use what you have, but a good mount makes things easier.

For most of us, a good mount is a GEM. A German equatorial has the advantage of allowing you to use a variety of scopes on the mount. You can do widefield with a refractor without the hassle of trying to piggyback it on a fork mount’s SCT OTA. One is also more portable than a fork mount, though an 8-inch fork SCT isn’t too much of a hassle for most of us to transport and set up.

How much should you spend on a mount? That’s up to you. Prices for GEMs usable for imaging with an 8-inch Schmidt Cassegrain range from about 800 dollars all the way up to 10 thousand dollars and more. Before spending oodles of cash, though, ask yourself how often you are really going to be able to or want to take pictures. For most of us that is maybe once or twice a month--IF the weather cooperates.

Me? Thanks to our stormy Gulf Coast, I rarely do astrophotography even once a month. For me, an inexpensive imported GEM is more realistic than a top of the line AP, Bisque, or 10Micron. Keep the sub-frame exposures down to 5-minutes for less and an Atlas or a CGEM can work very well with an 8-inch SCT. Given my usual conditions, it’s not like I’m going to be taking 12-hour exposure sequences anyhow.

Off-axis guider...

Don't scrimp on the mount, though. While I’ve taken OK images with my C8 and a CG5 or AVX GEM, it was clear these mounts were at their limits with the telescope. And so are the other GEMs in this class up to and including the HEQ-5 (Sirius). For ease and reasonable consistency of results, consider the next step up, the EQ-6 (Atlas) or CGEM or CGX mounts. If your skies and your skills are better than mine, and you are less lazy than me, I wouldn’t criticize you for bumping the mount choice up to a Losmandy G11 (about 4K), but you don’t have to do that to shoot good deep sky astrophotos with a C8. An Atlas type mount will do it.

Get a Sufficient Guide Scope

Today’s sensitive, high resolution guide cameras don’t require the crazy long focal length guide-scopes we used in the day of manual guiding. Still, you need a guide scope (a refractor or a reflector that does not use a moving primary mirror to focus) with enough resolution so the guide camera can “see” small errors when imaging with an SCT.

I am lazy and get along with one of those 50mm finder-guide-scopes that are so popular now, but I suggest a minimum of 400mm of focal length for the guide telescope when doing C8 astrophotography. A Short Tube 80 or similar will do as long as you can lock the focuser down securely. And you have a sturdy mounting for the 80. That is incredibly important when imaging at these focal lengths, since the smallest amount of flexure in the guide scope rings will show up as trailed stars in the main scope’s images.

Get an Off-axis Guider

Well, maybe. I suggest you try a guide scope first and only if you find you just cannot get the gremlins out of your guiding setup no matter how you tighten things down or tweak the Brain settings in PHD2, should you consider an off-axis guider. 

An “OAG” allows you to both guide and image through the main scope. One contains a little “pickoff” prism that diverts a small amount of the light at the edge of the telescope’s field to the guide camera. Since it is seeing the same images as the main scope, problems like flexure and mirror flop instantly disappear.

Unfortunately, there’s a price to be paid. The OAG will only pick up stars around the periphery of the telescope’s field. There may be few of the them, and their shapes may be distorted if you are using an older “standard” SCT whose field edge is not perfect. In this day of sensitive guide cameras, the problem of finding a suitable guide star is not as bad as it used to be, but it can still be difficult. I used an OAG all through the film days, but never found it to be a pleasant experience.

Get a Good Polar Alignment

Declination drift due to poor polar alignment just makes the task of guiding more difficult. Strive to get within a couple of minutes of the celestial pole if possible. That used to be tough, but innovations like the Polemaster polar alignment camera, and the polar alignment routine in Sharpcap (which uses the guide scope and camera to do the alignment) have made it positively easy.

Tips for Getting it all to Work

Balance

M15 + C8 Edge + Atlas EQ-6:  not quite perfect but mine...

With a sub-Losmandy mount, a Chinese GEM up to and including the iOptrons, be scrupulous about balance. That means balancing the mount so it is slightly east-heavy. Of course, you will likely have to rebalance if you move far from your initial target. That is not a big problem for most of us, since we’ll usually only image one or two objects a night and it’s easy enough to pick two subjects in roughly the same part of the sky.  “East heavy” can make a big difference in how an imported mount performs, since it ensures the R.A. gears are always properly engaged.

Keep Subs Short, but…

With a C8 riding on an AVX or similar mount, you may find it to your advantage to keep individual exposures short. To pehaps a minute or two. If you have a bad spot on your gears, just throw out that sub-exposure and be on to the next one. Over an exposure of 5 – 10-minutes, there’s a lot that can go wrong with a light mount’s tracking ruining that whole, long shot.

Do remember, though, that sub-exposures have to be long enough to capture desired detail. While stacking subframes will make a shot less noisy and smoother, no detail not visible in a single sub-frame will show up in the final, stacked, photograph.

Keep Working with PHD Settings

I didn’t for the longest time and am now sorry I didn’t. The settings I had were good enough for the APO refractors I usually use for imaging these days, yielding RMS guide errors of 2” or a bit more on my AVX and CGEM. Couple that with my laissez faire approach to polar alignment, and most of my shots with a C8 (reduced) didn’t have perfectly round stars if I zoomed in enough in Photoshop or whatever.

Eventually, I decided I needed to do something about my guiding, since I wanted to begin imaging with the Edge C8 again once in a while. I read up on the PHD2 Brain settings and devoted one entire evening to tinkering with them. In just that one night my RMS guide errors went from 2” to 3” to a bit more than 1” at best, and under 2” at worst. That, coupled with Sharpcap polar alignment, has meant that for me imaging with the C8 is easier than it ever has been.

Shoot Appropriate Targets

If a target, a medium-small galaxy or globular cluster, perhaps, cries out of an 8-inch SCT, by all means use one as the imaging scope. If it doesn’t? Use a nice 3 – 4 – 5-inch ED refractor instead. Why make things hard on yourself for no good reason? In addition to less focal length, a refractor in this range will be lighter than the SCT, and an inexpensive GEM mount will always track better with a lighter load.

And that is that. Don’t be afraid to try long exposure deep sky astrophotography with an 8-inch SCT, no matter what you may have read on the darned Cloudy Nights BBS. A little experience and you may find it’s not as difficult as you'd been led to assume, and that the focal length and aperture of your friendly, neighborhood C8 or M8 brings a new dimension to your astrophotography.