[Alchemy (Clive)]

The qhy and dewing problems

The 8 has a removable front filter, if you remove this when it's running it will ice over instantly, however, if you heat up the camera gently with a hair dryer so it is warm and reatatch the filter there is very little moisture inside so you should have no problems, I had a 9 month break whilst I built a new observatory, I then fired up the camera and no dew or ice.
I have now removed the filter due to flaring reflection issues and will be purchasing an astronomic brand 42 mm threaded luminance version hopefully today.... And will be installing it further from the chip hopefully with a better result. Note, this flaring problem only occurs on bright stars, not on galaxys , nebs etc, the fl of your scope you can do those small objects and would keep you busy for ages.
The sbig 11 megapixel was the standard for quite a few years and has produced awesome images, although the top end imagers are now moving to the 16 megapixel chip. The benefits of on board guiding are NO flexure at really long focal lengths, sbig also have adaptive optics.
It's your call, but at sub 1500 dollars for a qhy8 that will get you started.... But you definitely will want to upgrade at some stage.