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Old 05-07-2010, 04:13 PM
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Blue Skies (Jacquie)
It's about time

Blue Skies is offline
 
Join Date: Nov 2005
Location: Melbourne
Posts: 1,221
It would probably be ok on the planets due to the large aperture, which would compensate for the relatively short focal length (but still long in mm terms) BUT because you want to image and its in dob form now, you might want to rethink. To confuse you more, there are people with large dobs fitted with a ServoCat that do some imaging. Anything it possible, it might depend on how technically savvy you are as to what you're capable of rigging up. It is interesting to note that the best planetary imagers in Australia all use Newtonians, as far as I'm aware, but they've also been tweaked to perfection!

The comment about the 16" mirrors being "hit and miss" would also be my experience. Some are great, some are mediocre. A quick look-see test with the seller probably wont help, as you'd need to make sure you had perfect collimation and good seeing conditions to tell - I think you'd only know if you got a good one or not after a few observing sessions.

On the Meade LX series, the comment about the LX90 mounts not being up to heavy duty work is about right, although I've seen plenty of examples of people pushing them beyond that! You just need to be aware that they are on the down side of sturdy and can only carry so much weight. An LX200 is pretty solid mount-wise, but very heavy! Its really not portable unless you've got plenty of muscle and is best left permanently mounted.
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