Quote:
Originally posted by iceman
I hate astronomy as a hobby because it's so damn expensive! 
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Ah but unlike a lot of other hobbies, once you have bought the gear , you can indulge your hobby as much as you like for $0 extra
Just about any other hobby has ongoing costs.
If you become an equipment junkie, disregard the paragraph above
Well done on beating down Bintel to a competitive price.
All my eyepieces are 1.25" except for the 27mm panoptic which is a 2 incher. Whilst the panoptic is a great eyepiece, I find its an annoyance to keep swapping out the 1.25" adapter when I change eyepieces. What I ended up doing was buying another adapter and keep the other 1.25 eyepieces with adapters attached so that Im swapping around 2 inch components.
My eyepieces are 10.5mm, 14mm and 27mm. The first 2 do double duty with the 2x barlow, which in reality i measured at 2.2x and give me mags of 196x and 260x, which give me perfect planetary powers for average and also very still conditions. The seeing in Melbourne generally sucks.
What i reckon are the must buys in order are:
A cheap plastic eyepatch from the pharmacy ( Opiate would be proud
)
Cheshire colimator. A necessary tool if you want your scope to perform as it should.
Telrad or Rigel quikfinder, i have the rigel but the telrad is better.
The eyepatch makes a big difference if you can save the dark adaptation in your viewing eye if you have to turn a light on or go into the house. Best $5 I ever spent on astro gear.
My scope lives in the garage covered by an old bedsheet loaded onto my two wheeled trolly that looks the same as yours. When i want to observe I wheel it out into the backyard and try to find a spot shielded from the streetlights. Im plagued by them from many directions. If I get time on a clear sky night, I bundle it all into the car and go for a 20 minute drive away from the lights to a nice spot with a comparitively dark sky.
Aligning the dsc only takes about 1-2 minutes if I move the scope and then I normally spend a bit of time observing before moving again . One really cool feature of this dsc is you can push a button and up pops a list of all the ngc objects within 5 degrees of current position.
I personally never had an interest in astrophotography as I know the cost to do it well doesnt bear thinking about.
For the cost of a modest SCT scope with tracking mount, you can kit yourself out with top notch eyepieces and have change left over. Ideally you want a fixed mount that cant be moved.