The Intes-Micro Alter 603 has proven to be an excellent instrument as can be seen by my lunar and planetary images.  The OTA is nicely finished and appears to be solidly built.   Nice touches like the carrying handle and dovetailed finder and accessory plate add to the convenience of this very portable instrument.  The telescope arrived from the distributor  well aligned and star diffraction rings on both sides of focus are essentially identical.  Focus is accomplished by moving the primary mirror and is quite smooth with no evidence of image shift which would be a nuisance with the CCD video work.  Star images are tight points of light in a very black field even from my backyard on the outskirts of urban Livermore (CA).  The planets and lunar surface features are extremely contrasty and sharp, and the telescope works quite well on clusters and planetary nebulas, though I have not done that much deep sky stuff with it.

So far the only complaint I have about the 603 is the long cool down time (typical of all Maksutovs).  I store it in my garage which is not heated, even so, cool down time is usually the better part of an hour.  The present equatorial mounting (Spectiva) is adequate for my purposes, but a heavier mounting is really desirable.  The tube assembly and dew shield are heavily baffled which adds to the overall diameter and weight of the telescope.  Scope proportions are closer to those of a 8" SCT.

The 603 is a pleasure to use for video imaging either at prime focus or with eyepiece projection.  The 150mm aperture is in my opinion the practical lower limit for doing high magnification lunar and planetary images.  At f/35 Saturn appears quite dark on the video monitor and records similarly so that a great deal of brightening of the image must be done.  It is difficult to bring up the Crepe Ring when it is underexposed this much.  At shorter f/ratios Saturn's image is brighter, but fine features such as Cassini Division are difficult to capture to video tape in seeing conditions other than extremely good.

Intes and Intes Micro Maksutovs are available from the good folks at  Earth and Sky Adventure Products of Morgan Hill, California.
 

Cave Astrola 25cm f/6 Newtonian
Purchased new in the mid 70's, the 10" has logged more hours than I care to guess measuring variable stars visually and photometrically, timing lunar and asteroid occultations and grazes, and general sight-seeing.  Optically the instrument is most excellent, mechanically some improvements have had to be made or still need to be made.  The Astrola equatorial mounting is quite sound and with clutches on both axes, no locking knobs, very convenient to use, however the RA drive worm gear is on a very flimsy aluminum channel that flexes.  The DEC axis drive only has a 3 inch worm gear which is quite inadequate for guiding long exposure astrophotos, but is satisfactory for video imaging.  With the rotating tube rings the eyepiece can always be kept at or near eye level which is a wonderful asset.  Rotating the tube is also convenient for making minor balancing adjustments when a camera is mounted in the focuser.  Sliding weights have been added to the mirror end of the tube for balancing cameras and a photoelectric photometer head.

The Cave is excellent for lunar and planetary video imaging.  It's moderately large aperture provides adequate light for imaging the moon and planets at high magnification.  Being a relatively fast system at f/6, the central obstruction is rather large for true high resolution work, however seeing conditions are seldom so good that the central obstruction becomes a serious issue.

The majority of my video imaging is done using the Astrovid 2000 with eyepiece projection.  I use an Orion variable magnification eyepiece projection system fitted with a "c" mount adapter which threads directly into the Astrovid or PC23C camera.  I generally use a 18mm Orthoscopic or a 21mm Plossl which allows me to work at effective f/ratios between f/25 and f/45.
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Astrovid 2000 by Adirondack Video Astronomy
The Astrovid 2000 CCD video camera is an outstanding video system designed specifically for astronomical applications.  It contains a 1/2 inch Sony HAD ICX038DLA interline transfer CCD video chip with 8.4 x 9.4 micron pixels that deliver a maximum resolution of 600 horizontal lines.  It is rated at 0.01 Lux and has manual controls for shutter speed, gain and gamma.  The camera is reasonably lightweight and quite small making it easy to mount in the focuser of any telescope with only minor adjustments in balance necessary.  The separate control box makes it simple to adjust shutter, gain and gamma without having to touch the camera/telescope.  Images I have obtained thus far have been good to very good, with only seeing conditions limiting the camera's performance.  Though the camera has a number of shutter speeds above 1/30th of a second I find I seldom use anything faster than 1/125 of a second when doing prime focus images of the moon.  At higher magnifications with the sun, moon and planets I seldom run the camera faster than 1/30 of a second.
 

PC-23C, PC-33C & PC-164C
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Snappy Video Frame Grabber
The Snappy frame grabber is a very inexpensive, easy to install and easy to use tool that plugs directly into the printer port of a PC.  It operates in Windows and delivers amazing results at up to 1500 x 1145 resolution.  The deluxe version comes complete with some excellent software for processing images in B&W and color.  All of the lunar and planetary images on this web site were captured to the computer with a Snappy and the abbreviated version of Photo Shop supplied with the Snappy was used to process some of the images, including image stacking.  Snappy is produced by Play and is available in virtually any computer store.
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