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Old 20-11-2009, 10:57 AM
Ian Robinson
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Ian Robinson is offline
 
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Gateshead
Posts: 2,205
Don't bother with a big telescope .... get a good equatorial mount with an autoguider interface and a secondhand 300mm f2.8 lens to go onto your camera , a TC80n3 timer cable (what ever is the equiv for your camera), and maybe a small refractor to be your guidescope.

You don't need to spend thousands on the 300mm f2.8 , ie I picked up a Tamron Adapt2all LD SP 300mm f2.8 for under $1000 on Ebay.
It has a very useful and capable apeture of 107mm (just over 4 inches) and quite a wide and distortion free field on the 40D I'm using.

The mount , a Celestron CG5-AST will do the trick with such a light setup.

You'll be more likely to pick up NEOs in widefield imaging patrols IMO.
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