Travel/Equipment Dilemma

[britgc]

Hi guys,

Hope everyone had good Xmas. Happy New Year in advance!

I'm thinking about heading over to New Zealand for a bit of a holiday in a few months and was thinking it would be great to take my imaging setup over there and camp under the stars for a week or so and hopefully get some nice images.

I had planned to take my scope (WO FLT98) on the flight as carry on luggage but the case that came with the scope is too big for carry on so I would need to find a smaller, lighter case.

Alternatively, I was thinking about bringing forward the purchase of what would become my guide scope and taking that over instead. I was thinking of something along the lines of a Borg 55FL (the light, modular design seems pretty handy for future expansion possibilities) or a Stellarvue SV60, or maybe something closer to 70mm aperture providing it's still pretty light.
Basically something that could be used as a guide scope but would also be a great wide field imaging/travel scope.

Or, I could put all of this in the too hard/too expensive basket and save a bit of extra money :shrug:

Would love to hear your thoughts/suggestions on this.

Cheers,
Bret

[brian nordstrom]

:thumbsup: Hi Bret and welcome mate , Go the Borg but grab the 60mm ED , I have a friend with one of these and they are perfectly designed for what you want and once you sort them out the sky is the limit , awesome bit of Japaneese modular design .
I all fits on a small camera bag . Sweet !
Brian.

[britgc]

Thanks for the recommendation, Brian.

I'll look into it a bit more and try and get my head around the lengthy Borg component list.

[Camelopardalis]

How about a WO Star 71? Not as light as the Borg but it's small and well corrected. Should be OK on most star tracker units, obviously depending on how well they handle the weight.

[britgc]

Hey Dunk.

The WO Star 71 and the Zenithstar were probably the first two options I looked at, I was just unsure about how happy the HEQ5 would be in the end.

The FLT98 will be about 7kg all up with rings, dovetail, flattener (when I get it) and dslr, so it would probably be around 9-10kg with something like a WO Star 71 on there as well. I'm pretty sure it would be fine, but I must have read at least 3 different payload limits for that mount so far which put some doubt in my mind so I started looking at lighter alternatives.

Really, I just need to win the lottery without buying a ticket and then I could just sample all the wonderful little scopes out there and give away what I don't use to you guys ;)

[Camelopardalis]

Don't we all :D :lol:

Yeah it's a tough call as to whether the FLT98 and Star 71 would be balanced OK on the HEQ5...although at least the Star 71 is short :D on an EQ6 it should be no sweat...