Hi all!
Hope you're all keeping well. I quite(!) recently got into astronomy and was doing some research on picking a scope. While I felt I had some options nailed down, which I'll mention below, I felt confused about its day-to-day usage.
I'm a fresh post graduate, living in either a 1 bed flat, or ensuite rooms, based out of Nottingham. I do not have a car. Now, considering my finances, I came upon two basic tracks.
1) Play it safe around the 100-150 quid, go for something like a heritage ~100p and call it a day. No money issues, no portability issues.
2) Invest the money, possibly go for 150/200mm dobs, and use it forever. Anything more than that just intuitively feels impractical considering my situation.
Now my confusion lies here, say I invested the money and got a 8" dob. How am I supposed to use it on the reg? Am I to carry it (walking or public transit in my case) to spots and use it? If I have a window, can I just accept the FOV limit and enjoy what I can see from my flat window? Will I be able to (with the reasonable size/carry effort) easily transport it to places by myself? This is where my main confusion lies.
If the idea is that I need to carry my scope a lot, find remote places etc, I'm unsure about the practicality of a 8", as I don't have a car (accounting for the worst case scenario that I might not have good views where I live and maybe need to transport a bit). In this case, something like a Heritage 100 or 150p seems like a no-brainer.
If ^ that is normal, and it's convenient to do so, then I imagine going out of the way to invest in one good 8".
Please do help me with this as I don't have any astronomer friends to ask, neither can I easily imagine how I'd be using it, which is making my decision hard. Granted I could order and return in 30 days etc, but that's not what I'm relying on apart from a last resort measure.
Kind regards,
Sid