|
Hi Matt,
No doubt everyone will leap in momentarily to suggest you buy a dobsonian. This is good advice, but to answer your particular question, nowadays I would probably look first at the Celestron SE series. The 6 inch seems a nice compromise with respect to aperture and yet remains reasonably compact. Having said that, I don't have one. I still like my ETX 105, by the way.
The SE is a single arm fork. The chief disadvantage I see with that is relative instability, you know, if you're considering imaging (but then, none of these portable gotos is suitable for that). The advantage is the fact that you can swap in a different telescope OTA if you buy one, and rebalance easily. None of these scopes allows you to easily push the tube around manually if for some reason you want to (e.g. terrestrial views). And you need to think about getting a portable power source, of course, because using the batteries simply is not a long term proposition.
Good luck.
Brian.
|