Telescope Advice Please!

[hadyn73]

Hello All at SGL

First of all thank you all who have advised me so far. This a great forum for help and advise, seems like 1,000's of help and and advice out there..

I have almost made my mind up and hope to purchase some gear very soon, with all your views on equipment on this forum it's still very hard for me to make up my mind, so to speak. I have got around £1,400 to spend. (Its my own Xmas present) I would like the equipment to be reasonably portable as my loction is very poor for observing.

I have made my mind up regrding a mount -

1 x Skywatcher HEQ5 PRO Synscan - Heavy Duty GOTO Mount.

The scope which I need is for viewing planets, DSO's and in the near future I hope to do some astrophotography imaging with a ccd camera and my EOS 250 Canon DSLR.

Here is the list, please, please help me on this??

Skywatcher Evostar 80ED DS-Pro OTA.

Skywatcher Evostar 100ED DS-Pro OTA.

Skywatcher Evostar 150 (HEQ5 PRO).

Celestron C8 XLT Optical Tube Assembly.

Kindest regards, Hadyn - Isle of Man

[alfi]

hi

if photos of dso`s is something you want to do, go for one of the first 2, the ed pro`s.

alfi

[astromerlin]

Everyone seems to use the ED80 or ED100 for imaging. Wish I could afford one.

[MartinB]

Seems like you are moving in a good direction Hadyn. The ED80 gives lovely rich field views but is under powered for visual observing compared with what else is on offer these days. A C8 is a superb visual scope but is a big challenge for imaging with a DSLR because of it's long focal length, even with a focal reducer. You can really bring the focal length down and have a very fast set up by using a 3.3 reducer but that will only give results with cameras with very small chips eg web cam type cameras such as DMKs

This is what I would go for - HEQ5 with C8. Enjoy some observing, get to know how the mount and goto all works and start finding your way around the night sky. Once you've found out how dim some "bright" DSOs are try finding them without goto. Then buy one of these Imaging Source - DMK 21AU04.AS Mono and start imaging the moon and planets. This camera with a C8 is capable of delivering superb results.

After a few months you might start getting the deep sky imaging bug, unfortunately there is no known cure. Get yourself a 3.3 focal reducer which will bring your focal length down to under 700mm and will work superbly with your DMK set for long exposures. You will have a narrow field of view and the camera is only 8 bit but it will get you started.

After this, well you will then be in a position to decide for yourself.