Cosmic Geoff

A voucher or cheque would be the safest option.  If you are determined that it be a surprise, I suggest a classic long-focus achromatic refractor on an alt-azimuth manual mount.  Some people are in love with these traditional scopes, so your husband is unlikely to dislike it.  Aim to spend at the upper end of your budget.

Something like this, but maybe with the longer Evostar 90 OTA.

Sky-Watcher Evostar-90/660 AZ Pronto | First Light Optics

52 minutes ago, MarkusET said:

One last thing.....any advice on extra eyepieces....which one (s).

Replace the 10mm eyepiece with a decent one.  Plenty advice here on eyepiece choice. 🙂

And make, or buy, a dew shield. That's essential equipment for a Mak.

I suggest that you not bother buying any more accessories for this telescope.  The mount is not adequate for any sort of imaging.

I suggest that if you are interested in imaging, you do some research on what is actually entailed. Reading the forums here would be a good start.

Astro imaging is a very expensive hobby.

You can certainly re-mount the scope, but I don't think you will find the suggestion of an EQ-5 Synscan at around £700 amusing.

I suggest you enjoy the scope as it is, and consider buying a better beginner's scope in the course of time.  There is plenty of advice about buying a beginner scope here.

Eyepiece position is not really an issue with small alt-azimuth mounted telescopes.  But you should factor in the use of some kind of stool to stabilise your body position and aid reaching the eyepiece.  Standing to observe is not really practical for serious observing.

I do not use WiFi and am happy using the plain old handset.  

In my opinion the Celestron Nexstar GoTo software is a little easier to use than the Skywatcher Synscan.

If you want to image anything, you will probably need to (expensively) re-mount your chosen telescope, though you might get away with using the mount it comes with for some planetary imaging.

2 hours ago, Jimbo64 said:

Long story short, my motorised goto system has died on me (probably the motherboard).  I'm probably going to just buy a new rig (either another goto dob or more likely a newtonian on an EQ mount), but my thinking is that I might be able to just buy a new mount first and use my existing OTA.

Get it repaired. There are various threads here on this or similar issues.  Much cheaper than buying an EQ6.  Is a flex-tube suitable for single-sided attachment?

A 'digital eyepiece' is a digital camera - generally a cheap one, it appears. 

I think you will find such a device disappointing.  The main issue is that the sensor chip is generally small - similar in size to the field of a 5mm focal length eyepiece - and this is unlikely to give you the eyepiece replacement effect you may have in mind.

You can try it for yourself, as these devices seem inexpensive, but your money might be better spent on an eyepiece upgrade.  The eyepieces supplied with telescope outfits are usually poor. 

The AZ-4 might do (7 Kg max).

I suggest though that you get an EQ-5.  get it set up and mark where the tripod feet go. Then next time you use it, just take it out and put it down on the marks. Good enough for visual.  As you say, you can upgrade this mount later to motorised (or GoTo).

The video about the 7" Meade Maksutov makes sense.  The counterweight counterbalances the heavy meniscus, allows the back end of the scope to clear the base of the fork.   If you are mounting a SCT (with thin corrector plate) or are mounting a Mak on some other sort of mount, no counterweight is necessary.

There is no such thing as an 'all-rounder' telescope - it's as futile as trying to buy an 'all-rounder' motor-car' that's good for circuit racing, fetching the shopping and driving up hillside tracks. 

You could put together a deep space astrophotography rig with a budget of £1000 if you buy wisely second-hand, but don't expect it to be ideal as a grab'n go to keep the kids interested.  Kids will probably prefer something they can use themselves, i.e. a refractor ('looks like a telescope') on a manual mount.  Even some grown adults are defeated by the challenge of getting a HEQ5 to work.

Dobsonians always get a vote here, but are good for quick deployment, not good for imaging anything.

If you are interested in planetary imaging, that again has somewhat different hardware requirements.

15 minutes ago, andyboy1970 said:

Been reading somewhere that these de-forked SCT's have a counterweight built in to the OTA to balance them in the forks.

I would assume that purchasing just the OTA wouldn't have the built in counterweight.

Sounds like a social media story. 🙂  I have seen a 16" fork-mounted LX200 in action. No sign of any extra counterweight there.  My CPC800 (fork-mounted) does not have extra counterweight either.  There is no need for one if the attachments are put in a suitable place.  The mirror makes the OTA back-heavy anyway.  

I think having just one setup would be restrictive.  I have used:

102mm f5 Startravel achromat + ASI224MC +EQ-5 Synscan  for wider fields

CPC800 8"SCT (alt-az) + f6.3 reducer + ASI224MC for larger image scale.

Image rotation? I have some images taken with the CPC800 which show how live stacking compensates for the image rotation.

A larger chip (and more expensive) camera might be desirable, but could expose the deficiencies of the Startravel scope.

A steal at £80.   I have used the smaller Startravel 102 extensively for EAA imaging.  It works well enough that I don't want to spend £1000 or so on an APO to see if it's significantly better.

3 hours ago, John the clock said:

I have managed to get an 8 Newtonian on a Goto EQ5 mount at a snip, so I thought  at my stage worth a go if I don’t like the scope always got a not so bad mount, may then get a big casagrain one day, as I’m new to the hobby im thinking spend wisely at the start build my gear up, Skywatcher scope so it’s not a hobby killer.

Hope you get on with that combo.  Nothing wrong with either the scope or the mount.  The Synscan GoTo may be a steep learning curve...

I have made extensive use of a similar setup. You can dispense with the Barlow lens as the camera chip gives a rather small FOV even without one. You will probably need either an extension tube or a star diagonal. I use a helical focuser as an extender + fine focuser, though the focus is not as fine as I'd like.  And if you want natural colour you want an UV/IR cut filter. ZWO offer one for about £24.

There are several ways of attaching the camera to things (T2, 2", 1.25") but if you use 1.25" it is easier to swap things over to perform a GoTo alignment.

Use a pencil to mark the various focus points on the focuser tube.

I suggest you mount it on the EQ5 GoTo in your signature.  If you incorporate plate-solving in your setup, that will avoid a great deal of aggro when pursuing fainter objects.

The more expensive Celestron SCT outfits do not seem to hold their price well, and even a recent one may fetch half the price of new.   This points to an upper limit of around £1400.

If there is any problem with the mount, which clearly is not the later CPC model, then the mount can be discounted and the value of the optical-tube-assembly could be around £950. 

Does the GPS still work? There has been an issue with the GPS becoming date-expired, requiring a firmware update.

As a guide, I bought a new-looking CPC800 (a related model) for half the price of new, and got a box full of accessories included.

On 18/10/2022 at 17:22, ClareMcMullan21! said:

Hi, thanks for the responses. She’s 10, was thinking somewhere between £50-£100. Am I being unrealistic with that budget? 
many advise would be greatly appreciated. 

Almost certainly unrealistic.   I have taken a telescope to my local club's open evenings and found that the un-initiated are most enthused by views of Jupiter and Saturn rather than deep sky objects.   I bought a supermarket 70x700 refractor in your price range a while ago but the performance was sub-standard. Got £20 when I sold it.

The public were suitably impressed by views of Jupiter and Saturn through my 102mm Startravel with AZ-4 mount (around £400 at today's prices)  and my 127mm Mak with SLT mount (around £600 at today's prices).

You can spend less but only if compromises are made, mainly in the direction of the cheapest telescope design (Newtonian) and cheapest mount (Dobsonian mount made of chip-board).

Fedele's images for the same event do show the transiting moon very faintly:

Or the tripod legs do not all extend to the same angle.  I recall reading complaints about this, as a result of manufacturing defects in the leg/head area.

Here is a sequence of images I took of part of the Io transit.  I was interested in a phenomenon I have noted previously - the moon looks bright against dark sky, bright over the planet's limb, but totally disappears by the time the shadow appears.

I don't make any great claims for the imaging - rather it demonstrates how well this current hardware and software configuration performs under adverse conditions - the seeing looked poor, the sky was full of thin cloud, and the extinction, as indicated by lengthened exposure time, was around 66% to 80%.

CPC800, ASI462MC, ADC, 5000 frames, 30% processed in Autostakkert, sharpened in Registax.

In a borrowed copy of the BAA Journal, I found a review of "Planetary Astronomy - Observing, imaging and studying the planets" by Christophe Pellier (ed.)

It looks good, but expensive. After searching for a used copy on Alibris, Abebooks and Amazon in vain I found it was only available direct from the publisher Axilone at planetary-imaging.com for 59 Euros.

Since it is over £18, one would have to anticipate duty and collection charges on top of that.   Has anybody seen this book?

If you have no idea what you want to do with the scope, you should buy a 'beginner' model.

If you are worried about the weight of an 8" Dobsonian, instead of worrying, go out to your garage and make up a long bundle of whatever comes to hand (boxes, bricks etc.) weighing 20 lbs, and a squarish box weighing 20lbs, - the typical weight of a 8" Dob + base, and see how you manage carrying these around.  A fit adult should manage these weights OK.

In plain English, you would be using the telescope as a huge camera lens, in place of the Nikon camera lens.

I think you are about to discover that the SE mount is of little use for imaging, other than planetary.  And a DSLR is less than ideal for planetary imaging.

You first need to decide what you want the telescope to do.  Once you know what you do or don't want to do with it, the choice will become much easier.

The number of frames is OK. You could reduce the ROI and try increasing the gain - I don't know if 76 is high or low for that camera. 

With my ASI462MC and the smallest ROI, the exposure time is sub 1 ms on Mars. 

The details of how you do the processing make a lot of difference. 

Depends on what kind of camera you hope to attach, and what is exposed when you remove the scope's diagonal.  In principle, you need a ?? to camera adaptor, and you'd remove the lens of a DSLR. 

Given the telescope model, some might question whether it's worth the effort.   Try holding a smartphone to the eyepiece instead.