Bob, with the Telescope you have at present you can do planetary imaging.
For Deep Space you will be limited to Short Exposures.
1. The mount you have is Alt/Az (up down and left right) whic is not in Sync with the natural rotation of the earth. While this can track objects, the earth rotation will cause the field you are imaging to rotate over time and this will be worse in some parts of the sky than others. So this limits you to a short exposure. An option is to add a Wedge between your tripod and Fork mounted telescope. So you turn your mount in to an Equatorial Mode RA/Dec.
Look here for some illustrations of Field Rotation
http://www.todman.id.au/astronomy/alt-az_vs_wedge.htm
and here
http://www.cloudynights.com/documents/nexstar8i.pdf
In the second link is a review that shows how the Wedge is used.
The Idea of RA/DEC is that you aligh the RA axis witht the axis of the Earth (the angle of this is equal to the Latitude of your location).
2. The scope you have is natively F10 so short exposures will not catch much light. But you could use a smaller sensor (DSI I or II or even III or cameras with similar size sensors) and use a Focal Reducer to get your scope down to F6.3/~F5 even, or F3.3.
http://www.isomedia.com/homes/cvedel...l_reducers.htm
Look at this page, there are good illustrations of the light cone, reducers, and chip size. A bigger chip will suffer Vigneting (dark areas around the edges where less light is getting in).
3. Another option if you want to do DSO with the current mount/Optics is to ad what is known as a Hyperstar. Essentially the secondary mirror is removed and a camera is fitted here in its place and this gives you a FL of F2. Looke here
http://www.hyperstarimaging.com/
and here
http://www.cloudynights.com/ubbthrea...l/fpart/1/vc/1
By reducing to F2 you are catching more light in a shorter amount of time and hence can catch it before the "field rotation" kicks in. However I am not sure with a Single fork arm how sturdy your mount will be to support this method.
4. Another option to consider is getting the best Equatorial mount you can afford. Your currnet mount allows you to easily remove your Optical tube and add it to another mount. This is what I like about the Nexstar single arm mounts.
5. This above feature of your mount also means that you could get a Small refractor telescope and mount that in place of your C8. This gives you a scope with a shorter FL, and it can be reduced using better reducers. Also the light cone of these refractors is quiet larger hence less vigneting on larger chip sensors.
There are many options. But I suggest you start with Planetary imaging. Your scope's native Focal length is quiet well suited for this and field rotation is not an issue with this type of imaging.