When I joined the Stargazers Lounge (see http://stargazerslounge.com/welcome/95087-greetings-everyone.html#post1356680 ) I wrote about how I had as a New Years resolution decided to get started on astronomy as a hobby. Well...? The fates have been conspiring against me it seems.

I set forth in my posting about how I had already purchased a Nikon D3000 D-SLR and Pro-Star (aka Clevo) D900F laptop.

Well, it seems the drivers (windows or *nix) for Intel WiFi 5300 cards won't allow signing into secured (non-secured work) WiFi networks. So, in order to use my laptop on a network I've got to either cripple the network or not use it. Simply mah-voo-lous daahhhling. :rolleyes:

I knew about the fact that I would be having trouble with using a Nikon for astrophotography since there's just more software out there for the Cannon. However, I liked this particular Nikon because it used a CCD chip rather than a CMOS chip. True the chip isn't a Full-Frame chip (36mm x 24mm) but rather a APS-chip (23.6 x 15.8 mm) still it's better than a CMOS chip any day. Another issue was having a camera where I could turn off ALL the auto-functions AND I could turn off the viewscreen so it's not sucking electricity the whole night. There was also the issue of the camera having a viewfinder that passed through the camera body to the lense body rather than just over the top of the camera. Finally, there was the issue of cost. Let's face it, if money were no object I wouldn't care as I would spend the ten's-of-thousands to get the specialized CCD camera's the "professional" astronomers use and get another camera for my non-astronomical photo shooting. Taken all together I think I made a good choice for starting out and as I progress I can "upgrade"... and who among us doesn't fall into the 'I wanna new toy' category. ;)

As I stated in my intro I was trying to decide between the Celestron Omni XLT 150 Reflector OR Celestron Omni XLT 120 Refractor. It was the old Reflector vs Refractor decision game. Or was it?

In the end it came down to my budget could afford. At this point most would say 'he went for the reflector'. However what I decided was to put a choke hold on my immaturity in astronomy as concerns the aperture fever bug. I opted to go with a refractor but downsize in aperture to offset the cost. I chose the Celestron Omni XLT 102. With the money saved by down-sizing I purchased the Celestron Eye Piece Kit. That way I would have a full-set of Eye Piece's rather than just the one that came with the telescope. Additionally, the extra savings allowed for me to stretch the budget slightly and allow for the purchase of a Celestron SkyMaster 20x80 binoculars. Perhaps my choices weren't so great when it comes to the specific brand or models but all-in-all I think it was much wiser from a beginning to amatuer astronomy as instead of only having a telescope (with a larger aperture) and a single eye-piece I have a much larger set of observational tools. They're not great but they're not too shabby either. Not that I would necessarily know though. You see, since purchasing the equipment I've been getting in A LOT of practice setting up the telescope and breaking it down, hooking up the camera, moving the whole lot around vis-a-vie the mounts control knobs, etc... because there's not been even ONE night without cloud cover over at least 2/3rd's of the night sky. It's been 64 nights now!!! To suggest that 'Cabin fever' has set in would be a gross understatement. :icon_confused:

Oh, the 'jumping flea' lessons are going quite well. :D