New astronomer, need help picking out scope.

[livingsea2]

Well I am going to order my first telescope within the next week. I am just finishing up astronomy 2 in college and decided its finally time to get a telescope. Now the problem I am having is finding pictures taken with the scopes I am interested in. So if anyone can help me out.

I am most intrested in the "12 Meade Lightbridge. if anyone has any pics taken with this please post. It is going for around $1000usd on telescopes.com, so i am open to suggestions on better scopes around the same price. Thanks for the help.

[davewaldo]

Welcome to Ice in space Livingsea! :welcome:

In my opinion you wont find a better scope for that money for visual use. However if you plan on using it to take photos of the cosmos you can basically forget about it. As a dob does not track the stars you will be limited to photographing the moon or other bright objects like planets.

If you do a search in this forum you will find plenty of happy lightbridge owners and also GSO dob owners. (GSO make the optics in the meade lightbridge scopes and also make a cheaper dob of the same optical quality).

If photography is what you have in mind a basic Orion 80ED setup on a HEQ5 mount would be your best and cheapest option. Again, searching this forum will give you a wealth of info on this setup. This setup however would not be good for visual use and also costs almost double the lightbridge.

This is my opinion anyways....

Enjoy!:thumbsup:

[ving]

as dave said, the 12" is a gret scope :)
but it isnt for astro pics it for visual use... you need tracking for taking pictures.
however as dave also said you can do moon and planet shots with a dob, and mike (iceman) has an artilce on this very site that shows kyou how (warning tho, its not easy).

[davidpretorius]

i have in my plans(one of my options anyway) to use a dob driver II on a lightbridge, so it should be possible to track with it with a few mods.

go the 12" LB

[brian nordstrom]

welcome to the facinating (if not addictive) hobby of telescopes yes as dave says if i had 1k to spend on my first scope it would be a 12in light bridge , above average optics in a compact package. also i think that they will become a collectable classic in their own rite so if you decide to do astrophotography you should not loose much on an upgrade . hope this helps .clear skies.

[wavelandscott]

If you have not done so yet, I'd encourage you to check out Astromart...there is a very active (and compared to Australia) second hand market in the US and that might be another way to increase your budget.

"Pre-loved" telescopes from good first owners are a very good way to get into the hobby.


From your comments I am assuming that you are more interested in Astrophotography??? A Lightbridge might not be the best choice for that purpose but it would do very nicely for visual use.

What type of scopes are you interested in? Thre are a few people here that take pictures and they could probably help match up some pictures to scopes for you...