chris-star

That is so totally true! As literally no one has any telescopes for sale I found an astro fi 5" sct on amazon for £500 with delivery in mid feb so put in an order as a banker. Yesterday morning i saw they had the same scope for next day delivery but at £550. i changed my delivery method and it said i'd get it today (Thursday) instead with no extra cost!! Super cloudy here in Farnborough early evening tonight so after assembly and checking the mount worked with my app etc i parked the OTA in the shed. Need to have a look out my windows tomorrow to find a suita

any chance you can link to that comparison?

so thinking about it, losing out on a celestron astro fi 102 mak and thinking/researching some more i think i understand more now about the great advice i have received re the AZ GTI. I can't find a wedge for the astro fi & even if 1 existed i've not seen any mention of operating the astrofi mount in eq mode. I see the nextstar looks similar & has a wedge but they start at £349 as opposed to the £51 for the sky watcher GTi wedge. I do wonder if the skywatcher wedge could be used with nextstar but appreciate given the price difference the GTi wedge is likely very little comp

those photos look amazing. I do have a lot to learn about this but then that is half the fun!!

this is very much what i had in mind thankyou.

Thanks johninderby, Riccochet, really great info. i'm not expecting a Hubble like experience & i fully expect i'll need to buy additional scopes etc but first i need to get into it, hence the app controlled scope so i can at least get it to show me stuff & maybe astrophotography was a bit of a stretch, but i'm expecting to take snaps of stuff for my own reference and perhaps comparison as i develop and buy new kit. i've been looking at the skywatcher stuff and wondered how capable it is. being able to reuse mounts when buying a new OTA will help spread the co

Thanks Peter, any advice on an app controlled Dobson? Would dobson's be better at viewing DSO's? i was thinking for DSO the Cat's would let me at least see some and that would perhaps generate interest in me to look at more capable scopes for DSO and then onwards to AP. saving space and portability is a consideration at the moment.

Another newbie here, i've found myself here after spending weeks trying to understand what scope to get. I've been promising to show my daughter and nephew Mars and the other planets but also want to see deep space objects and would like to do so astrophotography. I'd also like a mount that will point the scope in the right direction controlled from my iphone. I'm still researching but understand that some scopes are better at DSO, others at solar system objects and i could spend thousands on stuff. i'm thinking a Catadioptric Cassegrains would be a go