Have i purchased wrong telescope ?

[FLO]

The only time the Dob's non-motorised base annoys me is when I am observing in company. If you have two or three people all wanting to take their turn at the eyepiece it can be tedious having to keep interrupting them to re-centre the object.

[white swan]

I have a 10" & its superb. You have chosen well.

[irishbloke]

I was just thinking one other thing I have found greatly improved my appreciation of the dob was something to sit on. I made one of these lybar seats: http://stargazerslounge.com/diy-astronomer/75124-my-new-lybar.html#post1177196

or here:http://www.stark-labs.com/craig/lybar/lybar.html

Cheap and easy made and saves your neck as you can sit at the right height. A wee project for the future!

[Macavity]

You could do a quick back-of-envelope calculation? <thinks> A star on the celestial equator would go around the complete 360 deg. in 24h. With a typical Dobsonian focal length approx. 1500mm, a 10mm Plossl would give 150x magnification and 1/3 Deg FoV. So, I reckon a star would remain in field for just over a minute. It's going to move quite quickly, but whatever the accuracy of the above, it would still be visible for longer than 2 sec! Stars nearer the celestial pole would move slower across the field too.

Unless you go to some extreme of design, most telescopes have about the same focal length (even a MAK127!) so the above is fairly universally true. Anyway, I can track things tolerably well with those sort of powers with my MAK on a small Giro III and the Dobsonian has a much longer lever arm to lean on...