Jason126

Thanks everyone for the advice! I will definitely check out that book. Did not know the flip mirror diagonals existed that's great! I'm not surprised to hear these aren't great for deep space viewing, knowing that all those amazing deep space shots were probably taken by Hubble outside the atmosphere I figured I shouldn't expect much unless I'm willing to pay $2000+. From my experience with rifle scopes, price goes up exponentially with quality and capability. My motivation for getting a telescope was my parents got me one when I was very young. I remember it being an amazing experience and I think it was only a 50 power.

Newb here. I have settled on my first telescope being the 4SE or 6SE and I have a Sony Alpha 300 DSLR I would like to be able to connect to play around with AP. I am barely starting to grasp the terminology involved with telescopes in general but it seems connecting a camera to a telescope is a whole different ball game. It seems as though the 4SE has a separate eyepiece and camera attachment? Looks like you can just flip a knob to swap between the viewer and camera? Whereas the 6SE it appears that you have to remove the whole eyepiece to connect the camera. After reading some reviews everyone says they immediately wanted a more powerful telescope so I am thinking the 6SE may be the way to go but I really don't like the idea of having to swap back and forth by removing the eyepiece, is there an after-market accessory that would allow it to work more like the 4SE (flip a switch from viewer to camera and back)? And I guess my other question is are the optics really that much better on the 6SE that it would be worth the hassle when connecting the camera? I see that the light gathering capability and magnification are better but how perceivable is that difference? My goal is to do some moon viewing but it would be great to see some cool deep space objects too. + One final thought, how much does the auto star tracking feature help or hurt the image quality? I mean on a 20 second+ exposure the object is going to move some amount, is the Nexstar tracking system really able to keep the object that precisely still in the optics? Or should I just expect to get blurry spots of light when photographing deep space objects? Thanks