Is an old orange C8 suitable for ccd astrophotography ?

Hi,

I have an old orange C8 equiped with an 9V battery powered tracking system and an manual knob for DEC adjustment. The tracking system has an handpad that can adjust the tracking speed but no eletronic adjustment for DEC errors. Only manual.
I would like to know if it's possible to use an off-axis guider coupled to a SBIG ccd and manually adjust the tracking error. Have anyone tried ccd imaging using this version of C8 ?

Thanks,
Andre

Andre
DEC adjustments should be very minimal if your polar alignment is good. Better alignment means fewer adjustments. I think trying to manually adjust any errors would be very difficult while imaging. You could adjust in between exposures however.

Andre,
I think most Celestron fork mounts can be upgraded with a declination motor. If your drive base doesn't have a jack for the dec motor you would use a seperate hand control. The only issue then would be finding/making a custom cable to connect to the autoguider. Alternately, you could find a more recent version of the drive base, Celestar, Ultima etc. that has the dec. motor control built in. These show up in the classifieds from time to time.