New to astronomy

I am in need of some advice. I purchased my first telescope about a year ago (Celestron AstroMaster 90 EQ Refractor), I saw a good buy on Meade ETX125 got that about 3 months ago. Now I want to start taking pictures of what I see. I am not happy with either scope the ETX125 is like a spring that wont stop bouncing and the Astromaster will not give me wide views. I decided that I want to upgrade telescopes and a good goto mount. I stumbled across Lunt Engineering while going through the Forums here and they have the 80mm or the 102mm ED Doublet Refractors or Orion has the triplet 80 or their 80mm Apochromatic Refractor Telescope. I am unsure which should be my next step. my price range is approx. 750-800 for the OTA.
Then mounts. The only goto that I have ever used is the ETX125. I see Orion, Celestron and Ioptron all have reasonable priced mounts but I have no idea if the quality is there. Any advice or warnings would be a huge help or any other companies that have good products at a fair price. My price range for the mount is approx. 1500.

Thanks everyone,
John H.
Florida

John…

I have two main telescopes: a Celeston CPC-800 and a Celestron C5+. I don't do a lot of astrophotography, and what I do is pretty simple. I mostly do star trails and wide-field piggyback imaging with two 35-mm cameras (lenses ranging from fish-eye to 135 mm) and prime focus images of the Sun and Moon with the 35-mm cameras or a DSLR.

Last year I bought an $800 Celestron Advanced VX mount to replace an Orion SkyView Pro that I used with the 5" SCT. The Orion is a nice, sturdy, non-computerized GEM, but the gears are not up to prime focus astrophotography and a non-computerized mount is a pain for public star parties. The Orion was fine for wide-field piggy-back work up to at least a 135-mm lens, but even at 790 mm (5" SCT + 0.63x focal reducer), all my stars looked like little footballs.

My initial trials of the Advanced VX have been very encouraging with respect to prime focus astrophotography. The 5" SCT + focal reducer + Olympus E-5 DSLR (4:3) format produces an angle of view equivalent to 1580 mm with a 35-mm camera. All exposures so far have produced round stars.

The Advanced VX is rated for 30 lbs, but for astrophotography you should derate it some (maybe by 1/3?). In any event, it may be the best GEM in its price range. One really neat feature is its polar alignment routine, which is so much more accurate than a polar axis scope. If you decide to get the Advanced VX, I have one suggestion for you: for critical polar alignments, go through the routine twice. I generally find a small residual polar alignment error after the first run-through.

Fred