At this stage this is just a dream but this may be something to aim and save up for: a large aperture Skywatcher GOTO/SynScan Dob.
The largest one is
the 16-inch. While that kind of aperture sounds exciting I'm thinking that since that is the largest one, it is probably pushing the limits of what mass-produced built-down-to-a-price Chinese manufacturing can do, so the
the 14-inch might be a more sensible option and more likely to be a better performer in practice. (Thinking about mirror figuring quality, cooling times, tube and mount stability, stress on the motor drives, GOTO/tracking accuracy, durability etc.)
I'd love to hear from anyone who's got one of these scopes or has had a chance to play with one.
As I said to begin with, I'm only dreaming for now because I don't have that kind of money, but in the longer term, if these scopes are any good, I'd be glad to part with $3-4k for that sort of aperture on a Goto scope. OTOH it'd be a lot of money to throw away if the scopes are just so-so or worse; especially if the optics are not up to the task.
I don't expect the scope to be perfect out-of-the-box (they never are) and expect to have to mod it to get the most of it. But I do want optics that perform reasonably well at high powers given the right conditions -- not just cheap light buckets that are outperformed by smaller scopes on planets.
The scope would be housed and used permanently at a dark (mag 6) sky location in north-east Victoria.
Besides visual use I'd be interested in doing some imaging, especially planetary using the video capture + frame stacking method (since the scopes have GOTO and alt-az tracking).