G'Day all,
This thread is carried over from the Astronomy Online Forums - I wanted to post some links to other shops, and didn't know if they'd apreciate that over there. Oh, I hope you don't mind either Mike
OK, so the scenario is this - I've already got a decent camera (Nikon D70) and a fixed tripod, but I'm getting tired of shooting star trails, and Sagittarius is under sky-glow for me at the moment. Because of budget considerations, I thought maybe buying a scope and a mount separately.
Initially I was looking at getting the mount first, or maybe a really cheap scope on a mount, but Ice suggested getting a nice Dob first. This way I could practice finding things, and still be able to do a limited bit of photography (pretty much just lunar and planetary imaging).
So... what I'm looking at now is a decent Dob or similar, between 6-12" (reminds me of something...
) and for a decent price. Looking through the latest S&T, I found a bunch of sites, and these are the scopes I came up with:
http://www.andrewscom.com.au/site-section-10.htm - Has anyone dealt with these guys before? They seem to have a fair bit of stock at pretty decent prices? The 200x1000 sounds good, but they've also got the 150x1000 with an EQ3 mount for a similar price... is the EQ3 any good? Further down, they've got just the EQ3 mount for $200 - I could almost add that to the 200x1000 Dobsonian straight away...
Obviously there's BinTel -
http://www.bintelshop.com.au/Product.aspx?ID=6325 They seem to be decent quality, but they're just that little bir more than the other guys. Is it worth the extra?
And lastly I was looking at some of the Sky Watchers from StarOptics - in particular the last two on this page:
http://www.staroptics.com.au/index.p...s&v=price&p=36 The second last one is a motorised EQ2 drive with a 5.5" (or so) SN?
What do people think about these scopes, or should I just win Lotto and get a 14" Meade?
Cheers,
Brad