Scott,
I would invest in a good drive to go with the tube assembly, as this expands the realm of your possibilities into Photometry and Faint-object Imaging and making spectrograms. But I don't know if the existing drive solutions for Dobsonians track accurately enough to enable you to make longer exposures without too much trouble.
( In principle, at least, alt-az mounts can be driven accurately, albeit with some field rotation.)
I note that there is some accurate CCD surface photometry of NGC 253 in the professional literature, which was done with only a 12 inch telescope......very small compared to a professional instrument. This was serious extragalactic science that was done with a small aperture, but of course it required the use of a motor drive.
The difficulty with a lot of visual observation is that quantitative science requires that the observation be reproducible. For instance, it is one thing to visually observe a new and strange glow on the moon (some people have seen these anomalous glows!!), but this would never be accepted as a reliable observation unless several reliable observers made images of it.
There are a lot of oversimplified and watered-down books available for amateurs on how to make astronomical measurements..... but these "even dummies can do it" project books are of questionable usefulness if you really want to do accurate ::
- photometry
and/or
- spectroscopy
and/or
- repeatable faint-object imaging which is accepted as being NOT full of artefacts and pseudo-features.
( They tend to be full of "real simple" fun projects, in order to get the amateur interested, but they don't get you to the goal of being a Serious scientific astronomical observer)
A well-written and detailed General Textbook, at the introductory level, about making physically meaningful measurements in astronomy, is "To Measure The Sky", by Frederick Chromey (published by Cambridge Press in 2010), which is at about the 2nd year university level
(or, equivalently, it is accessible to the mathematically/physically savvy Advanced Amateur Astronomer )
This link takes you to a a really nice and detailed course on doing astronomical photometry with CCDs. At the least, it will give you some idea of what is involved and whether "this sort of thing is for you" ::
http://www.phys.vt.edu/~jhs/phys3154...ometryBook.pdf
cheers,
madbadgalaxyman
There are a LOT of IIS people who are doing, if not always actual quantitative science, at least Serious Activities that could potentially turn up a discovery; I hope that some of them contribute to this thread!!