[pmrid (Peter)]

SOLD.


It's a 16" Meade Starfinder that began life as a plain Dob but has been rebuilt onto a heavy duty Go_To mount with a brand new Bartels system of Steppers on both axes (and provision within the circuitry for either a motorised focuser or field rotator at the eyepiece and a spare stepper motor if you decide to use it that way). These things are not small. It has a FL of 1830 and that makes it a good f4.5 or thereabouts.
I'm on the verge of a decision to either permanently build it into my obs or to downsize and make room for my 5" refractor wide-field. Since I want to do DSO photography, I would have to put the 16" on a big equatorial mount and replace the rack/pinion focuser with a sexy low-profile number to be able to get a DSLR to focus. So it is a choice of either spending more bucks or accepting that I probably aimed too high in the first place, accepting a serious loss and moving on.

I'll throw in a suite of 4 Meade Series 4000 1.25 eyepieces of various FLs from 32 to 9.7, all the Bartels gear, and a laptop running Win 98 to run the scope program for it.

I have been concentrating on getting my LX200GPS running right so have not yet even turned to this one to start any imaging, so I have no glorious deep-sky pics to show. I'll load a few pics on the scope and mount if anyone is interested.

At $2000 I am well in the hole on this one but you learn from your mistakes, right?

The scope is big and the mount is heavy - so pickup is the only option - and you'll need a big wagon or similar.