As a beginner, I seem to have been communicating with Celestron support on a regular basis. I know from many comments I have read on the net that many people have not had much luck, my experience however has been very good.

And a myriad of answers have wormed their way over time and space to enlighten me on what I was doing wrong. One might say that I am very pragmatic and logic, so after days of reading the setting the setup manual for the C8_SGT_XLT it was time to put theory into practise. Hmmm page xyz of the manual, hang-on mate, there seems to be a bit missing here, what did that say again?

Now I am not that sceptical to believe that the english text was translated from chinese, but at times I could be convinced. There was some pretty important need to know critical information left out or assumed. I was beginning to feel like the gun toting crazy dude in the film "Screamers" after he blew up all the monsters and ran out of ammo.

For example. loosen the DEC clutch, align the index marks etc - BUT no-where does it say retighten the clutch. Obvious you might say. Yeah, pigs can fly and alligators are docile creatures.

So off goes another support question (or two) to Celestron. This time I was a bit steamed. After pouring through heaps of pdf and faq files, I still didnt have any answers that made sense. So in my email what was a guy to do?

I suggested that they should have setup video's on their web site, you know, that show people how to setup their darn equipment. Thought nothing of it again till a few weeks or so later when I was checking the support site again, and stuff me, whats there now? A set of videos. Except the one I really wanted anyhow for the C8-SGT_XLT. Probably too late anyhow as I think I have the setup sussed now.

Now dont get me wrong, I am not claiming credit for this, I would like to believe its pure co-incidence, but a small part of me believes Celestron does listen......

Finally decided to find out how to setup that Celestron F6.3 focal reducer. Now it seems that there are some pretty big things out there in space, and if you want to take photos of them, you need this special toy called a focal reducer. Seems I have plenty of those now.

Yes, well, it sounds simple enough, connect this bit here, etc. Thought I might read some comments on the net, only to find a lot of arguments about how far the camera must be away from the back of the reducer lens.

Say what? 85mm or 105mm? Who really cares about a few millimeters? Seems like a heck of a lot of people do. Well, I guess there is only one way to find out. Use a setup with spacers that so in Image1, there is 85mm from the focal reducer to the Camera CCD chip, and in Image 2, use spacers to get 105mm distance.

Well that was simpler than I thought. Out came two very similar pictures. Now remove the focal reducer. Change the setup to be the same distance as before 85mm and 105mm. take a picture at each.

Then compare the images in photoshop, the two taken at 85mm against each other, the two taken at 105mm against each other. A simple task of to scale the Image2 (reduce the size) to match image1.

So it turns out that at 85mm the focal reduction is 0.64 and at 105mm it is 0.62

Not much difference really? What I learnt was if you wanna take a photo of something big, use a focal reducer.