Keep in the car portable set up

[Steve C]

Hello all, working away from home & stuck in endless hotels as I do does has it drawbacks, one of which is that I'm generally 100's of miles away from my main scope!

I had, until recently, a Celestron SLT 60 goto but found that just too small an aperture to be useful.

I'm after a small, compact & portable scope set up, visual only, which I can keep in the car during the week, to use when the opportunity presents itself (a rare occasion in itself these days). Something with a decent sized aperture, mainly to be used for Moon, planetary but also well known DSO's, Orio nebula, M42 etc.

I need to be keeping the cost to a minimum, but as with all things, you get what you pay for so am looking upto about £400

On shopping about I'm drawn to the Skywatcher Travelstar range, namely the 102mm.

However, does the forum have any suggestions or recommendations, is anyone out there currently practicing portable astronomy & what are their experiences to date.

[Merlin66]

When I was "on the road" I first tried an ETX90 - portable, small enough to be carried on planes etc etc.

The light polution in the places I visited made it a failure, the f ratio made it really only good for the moon and planets....

I then started to take my 6" f3.5 Cometracker on a Poncet mount; obviously a bit bigger, but at least I could get some observering.....

You might want to consider one of the small, fast Schmidt-Newtonians on a EQ3 mount.

Ken

[tooth_dr]

Not being an expert on this by any means, but maybe a refractor to avoid collimation issues with the scope being jiggled about in the car?

[brantuk]

I used to think I was the only one doing this so glad to meet a fellow "on the roader" lol. Whenever I go on my travels I like to pick "out of town" hotels - in the UK travel lodges are allways a great idea - the countryside ones are mostly back off the road behind trees with ample grounds and very relaxing.

I used to take a reasonable pair of astro binocs and a tripod - easy to carry in the boot and set up on spec. Occasionally I'd attract a small crowd and even had a visit from the police who'd pulled into the car park for a burger whilst I was watching saturn emerging from an alignmemt with the moon. They'd all want a look-see and it's a smashing way to get the public involved.

For four hundred quid you could get a very respectable pair of binocs but a small doublet/refractor on a goto (perhaps s/h) is also within reach.

Can't believe the number of times I'd step outside for a smoke and the sky was crystal - only to be greeted by clouds all weekend when I got home lol - so that's my advice.

Cheers

[Merlin66]

AFAIK the SN scopes have fixed primary mirrors and pretty well "locked" secondaries in the corrector plate, so they seem to be very robust, at least in may experience. I took the 6" from Australia to Canada, France, Spain etc etc and never had to re-collimate.

Ken

[jgs001]

Do you still have the SLT ? If so, consider putting something like an ST80 or ST102 on it. Yes, they suffer from CA on brighter targets like the moon, but a SemiAPO filter does a pretty good job whilst not messing up the colour of the view too much. And if you're looking for faint fuzzies, you can remove it.