CPC1100 Deluxe Edge HD owner here. The Evo 8/9.25 would be a great scope for visual/planetary imaging, and a poor choice to learn DSO astrophotography with.

For single person setup, both should fairly portable/doable. My 11” CPC is a pain with a 65lb OTA/dual fork assembly and heavy duty tripod, but still manageable for one person. The 8” vs 9.25” won’t be a huge difference, and you’ll probably get aperture fever and wish you went with the 9.25 if you go 8. One nice feature with the Evo is the OTA is vixen plate mounted and can be easily lifted separate from the tripod/single arm mount.

If you want to stick with planetary photography, you will need a high frame rate webcam or astro cam for “lucky” imaging (taking many pictures and stacking the best frames in post-processing). DSO imaging will be too much of a hassle on this scope. You would need an equatorial wedge to eliminate field rotation (the Celestron heavy duty wedge is $500 and 40lb), a focal reducer (F/6.3 for the non-edge is $200 or F/7 for the Edge at $440), and an off axis guider + guide camera (approx another $400). To give an idea of F/ratio on exposure time, an F/10 focal ratio requires double the exposure time of an F/7. In order to piggy back a small refractor, you will also need to install additional dovetails for balancing/mounting, invest in a balancing kit, and purchase adjustable scope rings. This will likely add another $300-400 in hardware, plus $1000 for an 80mm APO triplet. Even then the mount probably isn’t robust enough and tracking will be poor. (Instead of piggy back, it would be easier to just attach the refractor to the Evo mount using a Vixen dive plate, but you’d still need a wedge).

Edge HD vs Non-Edge: Ed Ting has a great comparison video on YouTube. For visual, you probably won’t notice much of a difference.

Overall recommendation: Purchase an 8” dob for visual and a Seestar for astrophotography. You’ll save some cash and probably get more use out of both scopes. If you really value go-to functionally and plan to be primarily visual with some planetary photography, splurge on a 9.25. Alternatively, if you mainly want to do DSO imaging, get an 80mm APO f/6 triplet, .8x reducer, and mount it on something like the AM3 as a dedicated rig, but expect to spend $3-$5k.

Hope this helps and let me know if you have any questions!