[The Mekon (John Briggs)]

John,

I believe your 80mm spotting scope can show more than you realise.

For this reason I advise to hold off purchasing anything else until you have found out the limitations of your present scope. For this you need to get to a reasonable observing site, and either try to extend the spotting scope yourself or enlist someone to assist. I have a friend who has an 8" dob, and when we observe together, I dial up objects in my 18", then he tries to spot the same object using his simple 8" dob fitted with a telrad. It is amazing how many times he can observe the same object!

So further advice is to get a telrad or other 1x finder, some charts etc, and perhaps another eyepiece, depending on what magnifications the scope already offers.

It will be interesting to see what kind of a platform the photo tripod offers, but I have observed many objects with a 60mm F7 refractor mounted on a cheap photo tripod, including resolving double stars down to 2.4".