Posted on 04/30/2021 5:04:05 PM PDT by Loud Mime
After my recent move to Arizona I am amazed at the night time sky. I am now looking for a decent telescope to study the Messier objects, planets and such.
It appears that there are some great buys below $2,000 in the Schmidt Cassegrain field, even some Macs.
Does anybody have any information they can give on this?
I had an old 8" Newtonian, which was a royal pain to take anywhere.
Reputable dealers would help. I see that some telescopes have a long waiting time before delivery.
I have nothing helpful. I just wanted to mention that the first time I looked through a telescope I was stunned. It’s been years since.
I’m looking, too...they can’t tax telescope viewing
Do a little googling, find a local star party. You’ll find many different scopes there and people happy to talk about them and let you see them in action.
Take a look around the classifieds & forum section of Cloudy Nights.
And visit a local star party. Amateur astronomers love to show folks their telescopes and talk about it.
I do like Schmidt Cass scopes for their versatility, but I’ve always been a Newtonian man since you can optimize them for planetary viewing, and they’re considerably cheaper.
I would recommend you consider what you want to do with it in the long term. I own two currently, one is the obsession 18 inch and the other one is a stellarvue 130. The 18 inch gives outstanding views of almost every messier object while the Stellarvue gives incredible sharpness but not as much power. It’s on a losmandy mount which gives incredible tracking ability. So the Stellarvue I am intending to use for Astrophotography.
You might want to consider joining sites like cloudy nights where are you can get the opinions of quite a few people in the hobby and they have a very good classified section.
I need to get a camera for mine.
9.25” Celestron is great for planets and deep sky objects but it’s best to pay more for a computer driven mount. The upgrade on the mount is worth the price. Type in right ascension and declination and the computer does the rest. The computer clock drives work much better than the gizmos you attach to the mount.
I’m looking to upgrade my mount. Shoulda bought the better mount when I bought the 9.25. Wonderful seeing in the great Southwest, not so much in the East. Good luck.
-Frank
Gotta a free tour of Kit Peak in 2009. We spotted Venus before the sun went down. But neatest experience was watching the sunset at 8,500 ft. The shadow to the East came to a point above the horizon. At that moment I understood why mountain tops are sacred to Native Americans.
Our guide wasn’t motivated to discuss the history of astronomy so I got him talking with questions about Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and his brass nose, Kepler, Galileo, Shapely (globular clusters), spectral analysis of stars, Hubble, type 1a and type II supernovae et al.
After the tour several ppl walked up and thanked me for making the tour more interesting. I love the history of science.
-Frank
A Celestron Master 130 is a good one. It’s about $280.00.
I had a 6 inch Newtonian. I hear you. Dragging that thing around can give you a bad back.
BTTT
I bought a 6” dobsonian, it is still on backorder.
I have a 3.5” Questar that I bought in the 1960’s. Beautiful, rugged, compact little instrument. Still works fine after 50+ years.
Not inexpensive, but gave me lots of pleasure, astronomically as well as bird-watching, nature observation, etc.
Double stars, Messier objects, planets. Lots of Norton’s observing.
The two big names are Meade and Celestron. Meade declared bankruptcy a few months back, mainly to avoid a lawsuit judgment. Either one is probably a good buy.
Everything is in short supply, so be prepared to wait.
I would go at least for a 6”, and get a goto scope unless you know the sky really well. Much bigger than an 8” and you aren’t going to want to move it around but the views are incredible. I have a 12” Meade SCT that weighs nearly 80 pounds, but really opens up the universe.
There are some great deals at shop goodwill.com with local pickup only in Arizona. Others are available for shipping.
While waiting for the perfect scope to be back in stock you can see a million stars using a humble,ceommon 114x900mm newtonian reflector.
Schmidt Cassegrain’s can be very heavy.
I bought a used one with an 8” or 12 “ mirror, (don’t remember now) and it’s so heavy mr. mm has to lift it to set it up.
I had a plain old 6” reflector and it was awkward. LONG tube but easy to collimate.
I also have a 3” refractor but it just doesn’t seem to have the magnifying power but is the easiest to haul around.
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