I started out with what I had on hand, a trusty Nikon D7100 DLSR. It is not the ideal astrophotography camera, but it was enough to get my feet wet. A dedicated, cooled astrophotography camera was on my list quickly, though.
I ended up with the ASI2600MC-Pro. I needed a one-shot color camera for sure. With such a limited view of the sky, getting shots quickly without the need to stack LRGB frames from a mono camera was key. As for the decision to go with the 2600, the small pixel size (3.76 𝝻m) paired well with the HyperStar and RedCat 51 fields of view. At those short focal lengths, it’s undersampled when the seeing is good, but a very forgiving pixel scale. And I’ve found the detail to be perfectly acceptable (at least for me) at that length.
At the C8’s native or .7 reduced length, the pixel scale is just right, although it takes some pretty careful guiding with a pixel scale of .55″/pixel.
