Best GoTo Telescope for Astrophotography of Planets and Deep Sky

[scottphillips]

Hey guys, ready to start planning on moving on to a GoTo scope, but want to know what the best one is for astrophotography of planets and deep sky objects.

I was looking at the Celestron Nexstar 8se but have read reviews and apparently isn't great for long exposures.

Could anyone advise me on the best GoTo telescope for Astrophotography and one that is in my budget of £500

Thanks

[ollypenrice]

The key requirement for deep sky AP is the mount, which needs to be equatorial and accurate, ideally autoguided at some point either straight away or down the line. If you can't track accurately you can't take long exposures. This is a fact of imaging life. There is a difference between GoTo and tracking which I'll mention 'just in case,' because sometimes they get confused with each other. There are alt-az mounts which go to and track but which are not equatorial so cannot be used for deep sky AP.

The minimum fully competent mount is the HEQ5. This will blow your budget so you could try second hand or come down to a basic EQ5 or EQ3. It's no good my saying they are as good or fully competent but they would get you going. They would also impose a restriction on the kind of scope you could put on them. You'd be best with a small doublet apo (more accurately semi apo.) This is no hardship because most people feel they offer the best way to begin.  Keep well away from long focal lengths which make everything harder for DS imaging. Again, a whole setup second hand might come within budget.

So it's mount first. You can use a camera lens on a decent mount to get started.

Olly

[ronin]

As Olly says the mount needs to be equitorial and then come the choice on the scope.

Usually people choose a visual scope and then find it is not so good for imaging, hence the "choice".

You could go for a goto EQ5 and a small ED refractor (70mm will be light enough and 80mm may not), but £500 is not going to get both.

Then you are limited by the load capacity, you cannot later go and put an 80mm triplet on and then a guide scope guide camera and the DSLR. Just too much weight. For that type of expansion it means the HEQ5 to start. The problem is expansion, you start small but can decide that you want more/better and that means bigger and heavier.

Could try the used market, sometimes something appears, ABSUK, however I see 2 people here on SGL asking about 80mm scopes that appear to be suitable for AP so there seems not to be many used ones around. Understandable as the long nights mean people decide to use them, before frustration makes them sell them in Spring. :grin:

Occasionally a used Megrez-72 or ZS-71 appears and if you paired that with an EQ5 Synscan you have a starting point, however for those to appear could easily take 6 months (or more) and you would have to be the person that got in first.

The reflector option would appear to be the 130-PDS, however they seem to be a rare as the refractors on the used side. A 150 PDS would I think be too long and so introduce tracking errors and problems.