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  #18  
Old 08-04-2019, 10:03 AM
GodsPetMonkey
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GodsPetMonkey is offline
 
Join Date: Jul 2016
Location: Brisbane, QLD
Posts: 18
Nice photos, on your shot of Orion you can also see the flame nebula and a faint horsehead - amazing start to your journey.

Anyway, I think that your ideas are already on the right track. While you certainly can do things with what you have, if your aim is AP you will soon find that this is a hobby that is frustrating enough without having to fight with your gear.

The true-and-tried entry point is an 80mm refractor and an overspecced mount. The EQ6-R is a solid choice - plenty of capacity, pretty decent quality and the belt drive was a much needed upgrade for a family of mounts heavily used in AP. Biggest downside is the weight; not a killer if you can work from your own yard, but if need to be mobile, well, finding the right balance between quality, carrying capacity and portability is really hard (and something always has to give).

Up to you if you want to buy new, but plenty of second hand mounts come up in the classifieds here - great way to make your budget go further.

Telescope wise, well, nebula and galaxies are the opposite of one another. Lots of big nebula, perfect for short, light widefield scopes. Galaxies are small and a long way away, they need big, long scopes. Big long scopes are hard to use and hard to learn on - you’d need to be super keen to start with them. So I’d suggest you go for a widefield refractor - easy to setup, little in the way of maintenance, and pretty easy to troubleshoot your setup when something goes wrong. 80mm is the newbie friendly choice (and cheap as a bonus), but you can just as easily stick with camera lenses or go to 100mm or a little beyond.

Don’t forget all the other stuff. I have an eye watering collection of accessories, but at a minimum you’ll need some way to attach the camera to the scope, and a way to remotely trigger it. I’d also recommend getting into guiding - silly not to if you have a guider port on the mount, and a finder-guider setup is cheap and effective. It’s one of those skills you can learn early and will never stop using. Then finally there is software, some great free options, but also some incredible paid ones. You can start with DeepSkyStacker and photoshop (if you have it already).

Finally, have fun and take your time. This is a hobby for the patient!
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