Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Astrophotography is not as easy as some people would like it to be. There are two basic classes of astro cameras. One for dim objects and one for bright objects. For dim objects you might need an exposure of 5 to 10 minutes. For bright objects you might need an exposure of 1/30 of a second. This camera is for bright objects like the Sun (with proper Sun filter), Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and Venus. You won't be taking any pictures of galaxies, nebulae, or star clusters with this camera. Planets are small with an angular size of maybe 20 arc seconds. Ideally you don't want to use any eyepiece. The image of Saturn (for example) as projected by most amateur telescopes will be very small so they build the camera with a detector with very tiny pixels all packed together. This way the image of Saturn will be spread across a few hundred pixels instead of just 5 pixels. Consequently the field of view will be very small and your telescope mount needs to be high quality. I have gotten a nice picture of Saturn using my NexStar 5SE but it is much easier with the CGEM mount. If you have a shaky tripod you're out of luck. Focusing is extremely important. I use a Bahtinov mask. I point the telescope at a bright star and focus with the Bahtinov mask and then point the telescope at Saturn. Unless you have a really good mount with an accurate finder it will be very hard to find Saturn with the very small field of view you get with this camera. If you use an eyepiece to find Saturn and then switch to the camera you won't be able to get an accurate focus except by chance. I have used the original NexImage and now the NexImage 5. The NexImage 5 allows me to get nice pictures of Saturn without having to use a Barlow lens. With the older NexImage I would need a 2X or 2.5X Barlow to get Saturn to be the size (in terms of number of pixels) as I get with the newer NexImage 5. Also, with the NexImage 5 I can presumably get 50 frames per second. I say presumably because I can't do it with the cheap laptop computer I am currently using but I can with my desktop computer. I now need to buy a new laptop. High frame rate is important to remove atmospheric disturbance with RegiStax, the stacking software you must learn to use to get really good pictures. To see what is possible I suggest visiting the "Solar System Imaging & Processing" forum at Cloudy Nights (cloudynights.com). If you're a complete beginner I would recommend getting the original NexImage first. They are discontinued but used ones still show up on eBay. Or you can modify a web cam.