Hi again Brent
Well you certainly got a lot of good advice
. One thing everyone seems to have missed is the focuser. If you stick with the C8, get yourself a good quality crayford focuser (motor driven as a minimum). That way you can do the coarse focus using the standard C8 setup and use the crayford for fine focusing (important to avoid image shift). The motor driven is a must as you do not want any vibration what so ever when going for perfect focus. I use a JMI smart focus on mine which allows auto focus routines in MaximDL.
I can also recommend MoonLite products (
http://www.focuser.com/) which are of exceptional value when weighed against the quality of the product. I ordered one through Steve at
http://www.myastroshop.com.au/index.asp (very good to deal with) for my 80 apo. I had many custom changes made to the standard focuser (i.e collimatable, colour etc) and it only took a couple of weeks to arrive from the USA. I didn't put it on the scope for a few days as I just wanted to admire its sheer beauty. The smoothness of the focuser in use is exceptional and I have not used anything that is even close to this piece of mechanical art. Mine is a manual 8:1 reduction but they also have motorised and computer controlled options.