Cosmic Geoff

Here is a live-stacked EEVA image (14 frames, total 174secs) taken with 102mm f5 Startravel achro & ASI224MC camera on SLT mount. The 9th magnitude comet is the smudge toward upper right of the frame. It's small and dim.

The original idea of the Dobsonian was that you could build the whole thing yourself from junk parts. Offering them for sale as factory-made retail items is a more recent development. The Eq3-2 is the kind of mount you would use if you wanted an equatorial mount. If you want a manual alt-azimuth there are various mounts that might work, but check the tube clearance.

I would suggest that rather than maxing the budget you start with a modest setup and replace or upgrade it as your interest develops. My most expensive and capable scope is one I would never have considered buying when I re-started my interest in astronomy a few years ago. I bought a supermarket refractor and have gone through several upgrades and changes of interest since. Beware the word 'compromise' - outfits designed for visual are rarely suitable for astrophotography in any form. A case in point is the C8 SE - r.r.p. £1600 - a great OTA for visual observing and planetary imaging, but with a mount designed for portability. On the SE mount it is difficult to use the C8 for planetary imaging and useless for deep sky astrophotography, for which the OTA is not well suited anyway. Also decide whether you want to start with the most basic form of mount (Dobsonian or manual alt-azimuth) or start with a GoTo mount that will allow you to find faint and obscure objects quickly and easily. In other words, do you think the fun lies in looking for objects or looking at them? You will no doubt get conflicting advice on this issue. For £500 you can afford a very adequate Dobsonian, or a GoTo outfit which still has enough aperture to keep you entertained for quite a long time. If you can find anything in stock. 😂

The 114az linked to could prove under-whelming in practice. The Moon will look interesting, but with the two eyepieces supplied, planets will look like dots. What else of interest you can see with it depends on whether you live in a dark skies area or in a town. Astronomy is not a cheap hobby and £150 will not go far. The Forum sponsor FLO has a beginners telescope section where they show what telescopes they could supply for beginners - if they had them in stock. If you buy from them or other astro specialist you will get much better after-sales service than if you buy from a High Street chain.

I assume this is the principal reason. It might also provide a sturdier attachment for some accessories. There is not much wrong with the Celestron #94115A 1.25" prism diagonal optically.

I think you should pay attention to the advice you are being offered here. I used to have a 203mm Newtonian on a manual EQ-5 and as a visual scope it was horrible to use. It will also be challenging to use for deep space AP, by most accounts. And regardless of what somebody told you, it does take time to get the gear outside and set it up. I find it takes half an hour to get an alt-azimuth outfit outside and set up for imaging - and that's without the added complication of polar alignment. Dobsonians have their limitations, but the setup consists of: Take out base. Take out OTA. Take out accessories. Start observing. If you have a decent DSLR, you cam do wide field astrophotography with it - just attach it to a mount.

I never bothered buying a 2" diagonal for my C8 for two reasons: Didn't feel I needed one, as I could live without the widest field view of a relatively small number of objects, and I have other scopes. The cost - add up the cost of good 2" diagonal, 2" visual back and 2" eyepiece and you could buy a useful widefield OTA with that money. Yes, a 2" diagonal would be mechanically sturdier but I have not found that an issue so far. I suggest you wait till you have used your scope package rather than rushing to purchase.

I made an 8" telescope from scratch when I was a youth. Sadly I do not remember all the details, but I think it had a square section wooden frame with a thin skin over it.

Did you mean "So there is no need to buy Skysync if you have Skyportal"? Starsense is an auto-align system; the other devices aren't.

That's up to you and the depth of your pockets. I have Starsense on a C8 SE, making up a package that can be carried outside and got going within minutes, and the Starsense is worth having to save the faff of doing a star align manually. I have another Nexstar scope with GPS, which takes about half an hour to get outside and assembled and ready to start imaging. With GPS, the star aligning process is very easy and quick compared with the total setup time, and adding Starsense would offer little. I'd have GPS on any mount if it was priced at the actual cost of a GPS chip and not at £180 or so.

The hard part is finding the right patch of sky, and then finding Pluto among all the stars in the image. FYI I managed to image Pluto using a ASI224MC camera on a 102mm f5 Startravel and SLT alt-az GoTo mount, and also used plate-solving and an online star map. If you do not have GoTo, then good luck.

For planetary: ZWO ASI224MC For deep space: your DSLR, or a specialist astronomy camera.

Only if you intend to do some serious deep space astrophotography that requires a reducer. Given that neither the OTA nor the mount you have proposed might be ideal for this, you could hold off on the focal reducer and think about buying a separate deep-space imaging rig later instead. By most accounts, starting deep-space imaging with a small refractor would be much easier. You will need a dew shield - if you can't get one quickly, you can make one. Other stuff can wait. You could, for instance, get a 32mm eyepiece for a wider visual field, or swap out the straight-thru finder for a RACI (right angle correct image) finder + red dot finder pairing, which would make it easier to aim the OTA when acquiring alignment stars or re-acquiring an imaging target.

The ETX 125 is not an upgrade in terms of aperture. Also Meade do not have a great reputation for customer service, it seems, going by previous posts here. If you want a GoTo Maksutov or SCT there are some options from Celestron, or pairing Skywatcher OTAs and mounts, or you could buy one of the new 6" aperture "Classic Cassegrain" and pair it with your choice of GoTo mount, all for under £1000. I'd call the 5 SE a 'mature' design. Some people are still using 40 year old examples of the larger C8 optical tube assembly. For planetary imaging the prime requirement is a large aperture, coupled with a well-behaved tracking mount and a large range of focus. Unless your Sky-watcher 130 is particularly awful, you could keep it and place it on a better mount of your choice. But unless the 130 is modified you may have difficulty getting cameras to focus with it. DSOs, particulary galaxies, are best seen from a dark skies site, and a large aperture is also a distinct advantage.

I am suggesting the EQ-5 because with its 9Kg (visual) load capacity and choice of drives it offers more flexibility and future-proofing than a smaller mount. It will definitely accept the size of dovetail used with the SLT mount. As will the EQ3-2 and the AZ-4, etc.

The Nexstar 8SE is a visual scope in a portable setup. You can do planetary imaging with it, but it's a pain to do because there is too much wobble and backlash in the mount, and you would soon be wanting a mount upgrade. I find that I have to actively guide to keep the planet's image on the cropped region-of-interest even with a short 60 second video run. Since you can obviously afford the extra, I'd suggest the C9.25 on the AVX. Despite some negative comments about this mount's suitability for deep sky astrophotography, it should be perfectly adequate for planetary imaging and general visual observing. I'd quite like a C9.25 myself, but I'd need another mount and...

You could use any mount you like, provided it accepts the Vixen style dovetail rather than the Losmandy dovetail used with bigger and heavier scopes and mounts. You could use an alt-azimuth manual mount, an alt-azimuth GoTo mount, a manual equatorial mount, an equatorial with RA drive, a GoTo equatorial, or a heavy GoTo equatorial suitable for imaging later. YOUR CHOICE. The choice of new mounts under £200 that are worth buying is somewhat limited. If you can find one, a steel-tripod AZ-4 would make a simple and sturdy grab'n go mount. Or consider an EQ-5, available new or used as manual or GoTo and with upgrade kits readily available. This is a mount that is good for use with all sorts of smaller telescopes up to a 203mm f5 newtonian.

Either scope would serve well if you want to cover visual observing and also planetary imaging. If for visual only, there are other solutions that would be a lot cheaper and lighter. And if you want to do wider field deep sky imaging, you need a different scope. The expensive and heavy CGEMII equatorial mount will only come into its own if you want to do long exposure astrophotography, an enterprise which requires a lot of skill and patience, as well as deep pockets. If you just want to do visual observing and planetary imaging, you could consider an alt-azimuth mount like that in the Celestron CPC range, which would be somewhat lighter, cheaper and easier to set up compared with the CGEMII.

It looks like an instructional toy rather than a usable telescope.

https://ensoptical.co.uk/ I bought a low-priced C8 SE from them. I am still using it.

Like Louis D says, do not even try to buy one telescope that does everything. The requirements differ widely. You can merge the visual and planetary imaging hardware to a large degree in that a planetary imaging outfit will also be good for visual, but the requirements for deep space astrophotography are quite different.

You should think of replacing the 10mm at least. You need plenty of magnification for viewing planets like Saturn. Whether the scope will deliver a usable image at high power is something you will have to find out.

I don't know what eyepieces you got with the 90/660, but it could be worth supplementing them with a set of decent quality eyepieces to give a range of magnifications, and also a x2 Barlow lens. As for the finder and diagonal, I suggest you hold fire unless the existing ones are giving you a problem.

Why do you think that updating the firmware is going to be a cure-all? It seems this is the first resort of many users, but you should read the small print for the update and see if it mentions the issue you are trying to fix. If it does not, it is better to leave well alone. The C6 SE is a mature product, and so it is less likely that it needs any firmware upgrade to make it work properly. Having Venus offered as a go-to object when it is below the horizon means you have the time/date set wrongly for some reason.

With Xmas approaching, a lot of people here are posting what is basically the same question - how to choose a great gift telescope without spending a lot of money. The reply to each is much the same - read the replies to similar posts and look on the site of forum sponsor FLO at their beginners' telescopes, so you can see what a good beginner telescope looks like (even if it is out of stock).