Posts Made By: aaron vaillant

I can't seem to make up my mind about which scope should be my first(technically its my 2nd but its been a long time). I want the best scope I can get for my money. I am looking at a budget of 1500 dollars. I know that can get me a really nice 80-102mm ED refractor. On the other hand I can get a lot more aperture in a newtonian type scope. I once owned an orion ed 80 and greatly enjoyed the planetary views but deep sky observing was never really up to par. I'm not sure if it's because I live in the suburbs or if 80mm is just too small to have nice views of deep sky objects. I know Meade has a 16 inch lightbridge truss dob that seems like it would be great for the money but my concern there is optical quality and if the views would be sharp and crisp. Please give me some advice or suggestion if any of you who have had experience with both types scopes. Thanks.

Has anyone here had any personal experience with this mount? I am new to astrophotography and it looks like a great mount for getting your feet wet. Not to mention it's advertised to be very very accurate and with little periodic error. Any thoughts, opinions, and expertise is welcome.

Here is a link to the mount
http://www.buytelescopes.com/product.asp?t=13&pid=12701&m=

I'm either going to get a newer but used cg-5 mount or vixen GP and want to use them for astrophotography. I don't have a scope yet but wanted to use the mount directly with a Digital slr. My question is there a mounting plate or something that will allow you to directly mount a Digital slr to either of these mounts. Eventually I'll pick up a scope too(orion EON 80ED) but for now I want to get my feet wet doing some widefield astrophotography. Can these mounts do that well and with just a DLSR?

Ok, I'm looking at purchasing one of these two systems but I can't make up my mind. Both are aplanatic and have great optics to my understanding. The Celestron is $400 dollars more than the Meade for the same aperture. I know the celestron comes on an CGEM mount but is it really worth the $400 difference. Would the meade with an equatorial wedge give me the same results for astrophotography? I'd like to use one of these systems to get started in astrophotography with a hyperstar setup. I guess my dilemma is trying to determine if the extra $400 is worth it to get the CGEM. Will it make a difference with my astrophotography if I'm using a hyperstar setup? Any good advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Ok, I'm looking to spend about $2500 on a scope and equatorial mount setup. I've basically narrowed it down to 3 different setups but other setup recommendations are certainly welcome. My goal is to start with something thats fairly portable, imaging ready, and great optical performance.

Here they are:

1) Losmandy GM8 with Orion 80 apo. triplet.

2) Losmandy GM8 with Orion 110mm ed doublet

3) Celestron CGEM 8" edge hd scope and mount


My questions

1) will I really be able to see that much more planetary and lunar detail in the 110mm refractor over the 80mm refractor?

2) would i get better imaging results (picture quality wise) with the refractor over the schmidt cassegrain?

3) How difficult is it to collimate a schimdt cassegrain?

As stated before any other scope setups that you can recommend are welcome too.