Home >> Hobbies >> Other Hobbies

Celestron SP-C8 History

Celestron, a company based in Southern California, produced its first telescope in 1960. Since then, the firm has offered a wide range of optical equipment for professional and hobby applications in the fields of astronomy, outdoor sports, science and education. Among these offerings, the SP-C8 telescope, a high-end scope made for deep-sky observation and astrophotography, gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s.

Predecessors
- Celestron founder Tom Johnson built the company's first telescopes using the Schmidt-Cassegrain model, which relies on Schmidt corrector plates with Cassegrain reflectors. Although initially limited to cost-prohibitive, professional-grade telescopes, Johnson and his company began offering more affordable Schmidt-Cassegrain scopes in 1970, beginning with the introduction of the Celestron C8. The C8 went on to become one of the longest continuously produced telescopes in history. In the early 1980s, Celestron introduced the Super C8, the first offshoot of the C8, which led to the development of future variations on the C8 platform, such as the SP-C8.
Lifespan
- In 1984, Celestron released the Super Polaris C8, or SP-C8, telescope. While its predecessors were fork-and-wedge mounted, this model was notable as Celestron's first equatorially-mounted C8 telescope. The company positioned the Super Polaris as a high-end scope with a $1,400 price tag. The Celestron SP-C8 remained in production until the early 1990s. This model and other Celestron scopes saw a major boom in sales fueled by the Halley's Comet frenzy that was in the news up to about 1990. Although enthusiasts typically have high regard for this scope, they tend to be wary of SP-C8 and other scopes produced between 1985 and 1990 because of quality issues resulting from the scopes being hastily assembled.
Variations
- Celestron introduced numerous variations to the Super Polaris C8. Early models featured large rings for mounting the tube to the equatorial head; later models mounted the tube on a bar fitted to a sliding connection on the head. Late in the scope's production history, Celestron introduced an SP-C8-compatible computer that could guide the user to 450 selected objects based on date, time, latitude and longitude data. While most SP-C8 scopes came in black, some variants sported Celestron's characteristic orange finish.
Successors
- Celestron continued the C8 line after the SP-C8 with models such as the DC-powered Powerstar C8 and its first computer-controlled scope, the Ultima 2000, which was introduced in the late 1990s. The NexStar line was introduced in 2003, featuring the first single-sided, swing-arm computerized scopes. As of March 2012, the C8 lives on in the form of the C8 S, C8-SGT and C8-SGT XLT compact computerized telescopes.

Other Hobbies