Hi there,
I'm after some help from more experienced star gazers in chosing a solid telescope for my star addicted 10 year old daughter and the rest of the family.
By way of background, my daughter has always been fascinated with the stars and is very familiar with the objects that she can see in the night sky (as in being able to find constellations and planets etc). We were given an old Newtonian telescope by a friend who had bought it at K-mart many years ago. It's old and difficult to align so it doesn't get dragged out much but she has managed to see the rings of Saturn through it which was exciting. I think we're now ready to step it up a level and would rather spend decent money now than go cheap and want to upgrade in 12 months.
I've been researching for months now as to what would suit us best but would really appreciate other's opinions. Here's our list of requirements.
* Something that can be adjusted by a petite 10 year old would be most helpful. This is mostly for her - we're just riding on her coat tails
* We would like to do AP so an EQ mount with good auto-tracking would be great.
* I would really like the Go To functions. The plan would be for her to point out what she can see with the naked eye and then use the computerised capabilities of the scope so that she's still learning her way around the sky.
* I would also like something that has a relatively simply aligning feature as we often head down to the coast and would like to take the scope with us (to share the experience with the grandparents!).
* Something that we can slowly add to with better eyepieces, filters, etc would also be good.
* The ability to upgrade the OTA on the same mount would be nice but isn't completely necessary.
We have around about $3,000 to spend give or take a bit. We were thinking of something around the 9.25" range so that it's big - but not too big. We don't want to buy a toy as she has expressed a desire to eventually study astronomy/astrophysics at Uni (and she's been saying this for at least 4 years now) and we'd like to give her heaps of positive reinforcement between now and then.
Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers...Nat