Hi Dave .
I have been following this thread for a while now so I will now pipe in ,,,, so in 30 years of stargazing have owned many scopes all that time , Newtonions , refractors , Dall-Kirkams , and only in the last few months found out what all this fuss
is about , about these 'Schmitt Cassegrain ' CAT's for short as I now own a beautiful Celestron C9.25 carbon fibre XLT ( here it is ) .
Dave no bull mate this is by far the best 'All Round' scope I have ever owned , not perfect but in most things it does ,,, it does very well .
Easy to handle , large aperture for good deep sky , 2 inch visual back so I can use my 31mm and 40mm 2 inch eyepieces ( semi wide field ) , f10 focal ratio ( 2350mm ) so high power lunar/planetary views are easy and awesome ! , great build quality , light weight for its aperture , ease of use ( mine is on an HEQ5 eq mount ) , sexy
and awesome optics ! to boot .
But yes that's why these CAT's have become the VW beetle of telescopes for no other reason than this , 'they do most things very very well' , to become the best selling scope ever they must be doing something right ?
.
Take a long hard look at the C6-8's as they will last you a life time and the optics and hardware are world class .
I will be keeping mine for a long time .
My 5c so for your own sake , please don't dis-count these great scopes .
Brian.