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Hi Colin and welcome to IIS,
Those specs you have researched from highest practical power down are not accurate. This is a fairly common thing.
Highest practical power on 98% of nights is "seeing" limited and not limited by the aperture of the telescope. "seeing" in astronomy terms is the steadiness of the air, which usually is the limiting factor in the quality of the views. Generically, people refer to a scopes maximum magnification as being 50X per inch of aperture. ie. 600X for a 12" and 700X for a 14". This can also vary depending on the quality of the optics. An exceptional small aperture scope will do a lot better than this and a poor large aperture scope will not get close to it.
Resolving power (the ability to detect faint detail), is by the nature of the physics always better as the aperture of the telescope increases. However, the seeing conditions will rarely if ever allow either scope to resolve to the limit of their resolving power.
The faintest limiting magnitude is again dependent on many factors in addition to the aperture of the telescope. However, a big scope will always go deeper than a small scope.
In summary a 14" telescope will outperform a 12" telescope in every respect on most nights. It will go to slightly higher powers, it will resolve slightly smaller details and it will show slightly dimmer targets. Targets will also appear slightly brighter in the larger scope. However, the differences between the two scopes are not large and in some cases fairly minimal. They arec ertainly detectable to an experienced observer. They are a lot less detectable to an inexperienced one.
Of critical importance is the fact the 14" scope is a lot more difficult to store and transport than the 12".
If I could only have one telescope, I would be happy with a 12"/F5 as a great "all rounder"
The added bonus is it costs a good bit less.
Cheers,
John B
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