Best portable compact telescope

[Alastair Rae]

I live in a flat in inner London so I have very little storage, a small car and need to travel to get any decent skies. I'm looking for advice on the best compact telescope solution for a beginner, under about £500.

I don't expect to take photos but want to see nebulae etc on weekends out of town. I don't know if I need goto or not.

Supplementary question: what use are "table top" mounts on the portable dobs? Surely you need a tripod or something?

[faulksy]

a sky watcher mak 127 would be good very light and portable and small, or a sct around 6". very popular scopes due to there size and weight

[West End Wendy]

Depends what you mean by portable. A 200P Dobsonian - "THE UK'S MOST POPULAR DOBSONIAN TELESCOPE" will fit in a car easily, but you might not have room for the wife, kids and luggage too.

With £500 you'll have enough left over for a couple of decent eyepieces, a collimating eyepiece and a Telrad (or similar) to help you find stuff.

I'm not a fan of GOTO myself, but that subject elicits many and varied responses.

Tim

EDIT: Oh, just noticed "small car" - must read posts before I reply. Still

might be ok though - maybe take some actual measurements.

[swamp thing]

I live in a flat in inner London so I have very little storage, a small car and need to travel to get any decent skies. I'm looking for advice on the best compact telescope solution for a beginner, under about £500.

I don't expect to take photos but want to see nebulae etc on weekends out of town. I don't know if I need goto or not.

Having a Goto may well allow you to maximise every "out of town" observing session and the small 127maks can be dismantled into a few components to make storage easier in your flat.

The only downside is its obviously not going to give you large scope performance on nebula. The only thing that'll do that is.....well a large scope.

Regards Steve

[Alastair Rae]

Sorry for following up my own post but I wanted to clear something up. Bumpf about Skymax 127 talks about using a "standard photographic tripod". My weekends out of town usually include birdwatching so I'm already packing a fairly sturdy carbon fibre tripod. Could I really manage with that or would it be too frustrating? Maybe with a more technical pan/tilt head?