Home > Consumer Reviews > Celestron NexImage Solar System Imager

This has got to be one of the easiest telescope imager/camera around. This imager goes in place of the eyepiece and the images instantly appear on the laptop computer screen. The included image processing software is very user friendly. The driver loads quickly in seconds. It is very exciting to see astro images of the moon and details on the lunar craters. The CCD chip is highly sensitive and gives you excellent detail even at low light conditions. The photographic magnification of this imager gives you a remarkable 150x. I have not tried it on Jupiter but I am certain that I won't be disappointed. Great purchase!

I bought one of these to use for planets.

Setting it up to work with the laptop was very easy.

Unfortunately, the nose is only 1.21" wide, so it wobbles in the scope - making it very tough to aim.

Next time, I'll try putting a plastic sleeve on it to get it closer to 1.25" - with that, I expect it'll perform well.

The price is certainly attractive. And pictures I've seen from others with this camera are impressive. If the nose was the right size, I'd have given it 5 stars.

Update 7/21/06: I contacted Celestron about the problem with the adapter, and they sent a replacement that is 1.251 inches in diameter. It's a hair large, but should work fine. I'm unable to change my rating on an edit, but this shows they were responsive to a problem, and I give them credit for that.

On this basis, while my rating shows a 3, I feel it deserves a 5.

I purchased this camera from Amazon and have had a few weeks to test it out. Overall, I've found it to be an excellent tool for lunar and planetary imaging. It is easy to get started using, but to get really good images, you'll need to spend some time and you'll need to be technically adept. A few points are worth noting for newbies. All astro cameras in this price range are essentially webcams that have been modified to capture video through a telescope. This technology achieves image quality by sampling the best frames from the video and then stacking them on top of each other. This results in much more fine detail. This camera comes with two different pieces of software that must be used. The capture software gives a real-time view of the scope video, which allows you to focus, but you must be able to see the laptop screen while you adjust focus on the scope (unless you have a focus motor). The AMCap capture software also allows you to tune the brightness, contrast, frame capture rate and other important video quality metrics. Tuning the capture is a real art and takes practice. The second piece of software is the Registax post processing package. It takes the recorded video, collects and orients the moving image frames and allows you to tune the detail by bringing out features from different frames. The Registax package is relatively technical to use and is a bit intimidating. It takes several attempts to learn how to use it at a basic level, but the instruction PDF provided is very well done. Celestron's support faq site for this camera notes that the camera's internal BIOS can be modified to operate in RAW (uncompressed) avi mode, which will improve its image quality by about 2x. I downloaded the 3rd party utility to do this and also downloaded a better image capture program that allows easier processing of the RAW avi files. After spending several hours learning how CCD video imaging works and upgrading/tweaking, I was getting what I consider to be excellent planetary images with my Celestron NexStar 130 SLT Newtonian. This camera does not allow the use of eyepieces, but can be used with a Barlow. It is equivalent to a fixed 5mm eyepiece. I also bought the optional reducer (see my review of it). Because of the fixed focal character of the CCD chip, this camera is optimized for planetary and lunar imaging (I also did some filtered solar images), but it would be hard to get good deep space images with it, and a reducer is needed for the moon or sun, as they will fill the viewing area several time over. All in all, this is a great tool for the money and lets you produce really nice planetary images for a small price. However, if you're a newbie, you should plan to spend a weekend researching, tweaking and practicing before you get decent results. You can capture quick single frame stills, but they will be disappointing. The stacking and post processing is really needed to get good images.

Received new camera earlier than scheduled which is always great. Camera barrel was almost one-eight inch too small though which made securing in eyepiece holder difficult. I called Celestron to see what they could do for me. They were very nice and immediately sent me an RMA for a return. Return took about ten days from ship to my door which is normal. Barrel is now exactly 1.25". The camera itself is very cool - just used terrestrially so far but look forward to dark skies. If you have Vista you will need to download the driver from their web site - works fine.

I used the NexImager with my Celestron 130 SLT. It was very good for moon viewing but it struggled a bit with the planets. For example, I found that viewing Saturn through a normal eyepiece produced a better and sharper image than using the NexImage. Also the CCD resolution of 640x480 is low in this day when megapixel CCD's are commonplace even in low price cameras. My unit also produced a fair amount of noise when viewing a dark sky.

But it is fun to play with and given it's low price, it is worth having.

A more expensive and useful add-on would be to make it wireless to avoid the cable that runs from the telescope to your PC.

As a side note, I'm using the NexImage with a Macintosh Macbook laptop. Though the software is written for a PC, I am using it fine via VMWare Fusion hosting a Windows XP OS.