Hyperstar-ing your meade 14"

yea. the stars are not great in it, he also said (somewhere else) that he wasn't able to use filters with the setup, I only noticed now the big reflection from the bright star, in the reflection you can see there is clearly something wrong with the star image.
Someone should come up with a 4 vain spider system where the camera is supported by the end of the scope tube as opposed to having the corrector plate hold the weight.

What's the benefit of this device? (Noobie question?)

It allows you to turn your f/10 Schmidt Casegrain Telescope into an f/2 imaging system, resulting in (potentially) a much wider field of view and much shorter integration (exposure) times when imaging. Everything in optics is a trade-off, as this system demonstrates!

Phil.

If you check out Celestron users you will see that the general consencus is that it is not worth the cost / effort due to;

1 Inability to reliably collimate the system
2 F2 Camera lenses are much cheaper! and much better.
3 Restricted camera choice

Dave Grennan looked into the faststar / hyperstar before he bought his photo optimised newtonian.

Later,

Jed.

PS I am seriously considering selling my C-11 for a similar newtonian

Celestron used to sell a smidt camera that could do similar F2 based images with a highly corrected optics.

The basic reason to use these cameras is very wide field images at very very fast speed (F2) When they work well you get a very nice well corected image.

Unfortunatly the Faststar just does not work very well.

Later,

Jed.

I know where you are coming from, that Newt. is magic for imaging.