which scope

[brrttpaul]

I know its rather vague but going to be looking at a scope soon and need to pick your brains. I was always under the impression that I would need a refractor for imaging but looking at the reflectors I see lots at F5 there abouts. Anyway back to refractors the skywatcher esprit 80 ED triplet  F5, the Eqinox 80 APO PRO OTA , or the evostar 100ED DS Pro outfit. I really keep going back and forth over and over and over. My main thing is imaging with a DSLR and hope to move on to  a ccd camera in the future,  I would say I would want to image more deep space objects plus the occasional Jupiter. Any suggestions or feedback on these or any other scopes would be much appreciated, at the m i,m using a Skywatcher 150 reflector

[ronin]

I tend to think that if you do not get a triplet then at some time you will want one just to find out if the correction is better enough.

So anything in that lot that is an ED doublet maybe pass over.

Point is simply that at the first (?) occurance of CA you will question if you should have gone for the triplet, also to reduce CA an ED doublet really should be longer relatively.

After that it is up to you but in terms of performance, size, weight the 80mm apo seems the best all round option. I would stay away from an f/5 refractor even in a triplet FPL-53 apo - the glass is being pushed to or beyond it's limits in my opinion, f/6 makes more sense.

One aspect is that if the intention is imaging now and going to narrow band imaging soon after then an ED doublet will be fine as the CA aspect is in effect removed in NB. Means you would possibly have to accept a little CA now but that is removed further down the line, and a bit of hard earned cash is saved.

The equipment for DSO imaging is I suspect not suited to imaging things like Jupiter, say this as usually Jupiter is blown up with a 2x or 3x barlow on a Mak/SCT, you might get something with a short refractor and say a 3x or 5x powermate that produes similar but not sure how good it would come out at the end. Still no harm in trying.

Does no one do a sort of specialised reflector for imaging? The PDS ones seem to be a bit of a minor changes to a normal newtonian rather then a design intended for imaging?

[hograt]

I still use my Skywatcher 80ED which is testament to the capability of this doublet when compared to my larger triplet and even larger f8 RC. You could also consider a 6 or 8" ritchey chretien as these are extremely capable and offer both excellent visual and photographic performance.

Martin

[brrttpaul]

Thanks for the replies guys and valuable advice

[brrttpaul]

After looking think its either the equinox 80 or the esprit 80 pro triplet, would it be worth the extra £300 thats the question