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Thanks Allan, Phil,
My astronomy experience is limited but I attended a few ASV Heathcote star-b-cues back in the day as a guest. Ill never forget the star-b-cue night I "heard" a bright meteorite enter the atmosphere and burn up. No-one believed me and I couldnt add to it until I read a New Scientist article on the phenomena a couple years later, something to do with sound waves and slight gap between enamel and fillings in teeth. Ive also seen the southern aurora from about an hour out of Melbourne up the Hume one night, sheets of red, hanging in the air. Anyway, I digress but the interest in astronomy is a longstanding one.
What happened is this, I bought a GSO 12" dob for Christmas and the missus baulked when she saw this hot water heater in the lounge Christmas morning. Admittedly, it was bigger than I thought. Anyway, beautiful scope but not very portable so it has to go..well, if there are two people and you have a wagon with fold down seats its portable. Saw Jupiter through it on the first night and thought how does anyone do anything with a dob without an RDF!
Having been educated by the Australian Geographic Shop the missus wanted a Celestron scope for the daughter, so I started looking at the 6SE and then thought about the 8SE because hey, bigger is better! By the way, the daughter loves the dob, awesome like her dad, was her response. So Im going to put it up for sale here in WA and try and get some $ back.
I was looking at the reflectors on Andrews Communications...8" or 10" f4 Newtonian with goto on a Skywatcher EQ6PRO tripod. I suppose its portable if the OTA and tripod are easy enough to seperate, but hard to estimate the size. Im guessing that setup would be reasonable for astrophotography though? f4 is better than f5 for astrophotography?
Another option would be to keep the dob, deck it out with a telrad, some extra eyepieces, maybe a ccd camera setup, and do they do a goto kit for dobs? And then ask the missus...from a distance...to accept the portability issue.
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