Nice trip down memory lane.
Although some revel the orange tube C8s, or any orange tube SC for that matter, I believe the models that followed are significantly better, particularly in terms of brighter images due to up to 20% greater throughput due to improved coatings.
Hopefully, the Meade SCs have improved over the LX 10" I had from yesteryear of which meade replaced the primary because of the poor quality of images. Some of the later 8" models I 've seen in the field were decent, both optically and mechanically.
My workhorse scope remains: a 16" astrosystems telekit, built like a tank with sky commander DSCs, holding up quite nicely after 30 years and still reasonably portable as it disassembles/reassembles fairly easily. I recently had the optics recoated by Terry O and he's got scopes coming out of the walls in his optics lab. He also, for the past few years, makes the mirrors for Edmund Scientific and he was completing an 18" and an 6" for them at the time. He also does the mirrors for Obsession scopes and he was just completing five 22" mirrors for them when I visited his shop.
I also have a 12" ES truss dob and I use it as a grab and go. I don't disassemble it and I put the structure into the back of my SUV alongside its rocker box and I'm off to use it in cold weather because I can get it back into the vehicle the morning after observing very quickly when its as cold as hell. Nice optically, too and better than I thought it might be. A pretty good bargain at the time I bought it, around $975 shipped and no tax during a sale from ES in Az. That's double that now, if you can get one. I also had Dennis Steele from Dobstuff equip it with sky commandeer DSCs. A great guy to do business with, BTW.

Hi Rod,

I've never been a Dob guy, I've always seemed to prefer snobbish higher tech solutions....lol . That and I'm inherently lazy I guess.

I would love to have gone thru Terry's shop. It would have like been going along a Ferrari assembly line..

I found over the years that most of my experiences with SCT's were so-so... Although I have found that the Celestron SE6 OTAs are usually very good and as I mentioned in the subject article, the Meade 6" ACF optics were really nice too.

But reading your reply above, you and I seem to play in different aperture classes.

There were several, all back in the late 80s and 90s. For most of the intervening years I owned just two: A Pronto and a Questar 3.5”.

One was a 5” Meade on a G11 mount that gave me some of the best views of the heavens I’ve ever had, including comets Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake. but it was too impractical for me back then when I was working. I sold the Meade to Jay Reynolds Freeman, who I believe still has it.

A scope I’d like to have now is the 80mm Borg I picked up as part of a trade. I knew nothing about Borgs and had no idea how good it was, so traded it off again before giving it a proper test.

I bought a beautiful 10” Newtonian on a heavy mount from a a neighbor who hadn’t used it in well over a decade- might have been a Cave. I spent half a year replacing hardware, coating and painting the inside of the tube, having the mirror re-coated by Clausing, and rebuilding the mount. Like the Meade, it was impractical for me. I couldn’t use it at home, and it was too big and heavy to move.

Since then it’s been the Q for the moon and solar events and the Pronto for hauling out to dark skies. But I just bought myself a TV-85 as a 70th birthday present, so the cycle of buying and selling might be starting again. Hey, anyone want a Questar?

OMG!! Me TOO! Several of the scopes you mentioned, but for me a Takahashi 130, Takahashi 60, TeleVue Genesis. I wish I had the foresight to have kept them. Oh well.

Oh man, I will second the Brandon 94. Mine was one of the rare ones with a white tube. I bought it used when they were still available new, and though I had owned a good Unitron 114 previously, the Brandon was the scope that really showed me what a fine refractor could do. I used it to observe the Shoemaker-Levy collisions with Jupiter in 1994. From my notes: "This is spectacular... The [impact] spots really make clear the turbulence and energy of the Jovian sphere." I'll never forget that amazing view through that beautifully made instrument. At a low point in my life I sold it, failing to understand that it was worth more than money. Other great scopes have passed through my hands, but that's the only one that it hurts to remember.

On a lighter note, we might start a thread on "scopes I should have got rid of sooner." Like a certain SCT that I permitted to waste my time year after year, that wouldn't align and took forever to settle down thermally. No regrets about that one! :-)