Whats the best goto telescope for less than £325

[burningbarricade]

Hi there, I'm looking for a good all rounder telescope - good for planets as well as DSOs. It probably needs to have GOTO since time will be a factor as will light polution. Doesn't need to be overly portable as long as it could be put in a car and taken places occasionally.

Also I have a good DSLR camera which I would want to employ once I got the hang of the telescope. What do I need to be able to hook the camera to the telescope?

thanks in advance

[EA2007]

Hello,

I had the Celestron NexStar 4SE for a while and it was a good little scope and fits into your criteria of being around the £320 mark as well as being a GOTO and you can add a camera to it.

The scope also has a wedge facility for long exposure imaging (which is really very good), along with a guider port so you can track objects more accuratly (with the aid of a secondary scope or ccd mix), the optics have Celestrons StarBright XLT coatings which give good contrast for lunar and planetary work.....all in all a good scope.

There are however some drawbacks......the fork arm is plastic so if your adding a camera then the weight and shutter release may wobble it (I found), also its rather noisy (like a coffee grinder on the max. slew speed) and the field of view is quite small as its a Maksutov-Cassegrain, this means that for a view of say M31 all you will see is the core of the galaxy, you will have to move it around to get the satellite galaxy of M32, however in a Newtonian you have a larger field of view so both objects sit in the frame well...........also, being a Mak-Cass, it has a high focal ratio meaning that for imaging you will need to spend extra time exposing and even bfore imaging you may have difficulty finding dso's in light skies.

I found that on star clusters I could only expose for 30 seconds then the tracking went loose....you may find though that with an autoguider or lighter imaging device this solves the problem.

Good luck with it though.

[scotastro]

The new Skywatcher SynScan AZ GOTO scopes are a little cheaper than Celestron equivalents, but then the GOTO software is a little less sophisticated.

The Mak102 with the VAT change is in your price range, though good for planets it is more limited on DSOs due to the aperture. The ST102 refractor version should not be over looked either at only £295, but again has limitations. EA2007 points are still valid for these scopes too.

To get good DSO images you don't need a scope with much aperture, but you do need a heavy (and stable) Equatorial mount, unfortunately, this alone is more than your budget even without GOTO.

Mike.

[ChrisEdu]

I've got the Nexstar 4SE and it is a nice little scope. HOwever, I would probably suggest looking at the new Skywatcher Skymax range of scopes, as they seem excellent VFM.