Before you sink the big bucks into that TEC scope, maybe you should try a little game I sometimes play with myself when I'm reading the astro mags.
See if you can sort the moon pictures by scope type without looking at the credits. I just check to see if a picture is really, really, "oh wow!" sharp, and guess refractor. A little soft means cassegrain. Mostly (almost always it seems) I'm right. You might have to spend a little time educating your eye, and learning to make adjustments for the scale of the image, but pretty soon you might learn to see the difference reliably.
I'm not trying to bash compound scopes. Obviously they have wonderful advantages or there would not be so many people using them. I'm just suggesting that for a bright, easy-to-find target like the moon most of those advantages may not come into play.
A TV-102 will easily support 250X, or 300x in great seeing (rare, lately, where I live). The images are breathtaking. It's a lot less expensive than the TEC, and that might let you keep your Meade for the faint fuzzies the TV-102 can't show you.
Just a thought....
Steve
See if you can sort the moon pictures by scope type without looking at the credits. I just check to see if a picture is really, really, "oh wow!" sharp, and guess refractor. A little soft means cassegrain. Mostly (almost always it seems) I'm right. You might have to spend a little time educating your eye, and learning to make adjustments for the scale of the image, but pretty soon you might learn to see the difference reliably.
I'm not trying to bash compound scopes. Obviously they have wonderful advantages or there would not be so many people using them. I'm just suggesting that for a bright, easy-to-find target like the moon most of those advantages may not come into play.
A TV-102 will easily support 250X, or 300x in great seeing (rare, lately, where I live). The images are breathtaking. It's a lot less expensive than the TEC, and that might let you keep your Meade for the faint fuzzies the TV-102 can't show you.
Just a thought....
Steve
