[djm (Damien)]

Hi,

I'm soon to be buying my first real telescope, probably a Takahashi TSA-102. I'm planning on using it primarily for visual observation at first, but would like to do some astrophotography down the road. This is certainly a better optical system than I need, but I'm figuring that it will ast me for life and my children will get to inherit it one day :-)

It seems like the Takahashi German Equatorial mounts for a scope of this weight are approximately the same price as the OTA itself and substantially more if one overprovisions the loading capacity to accommodate finders, DSLRs, etc.

Given that I'm not planning on doing astrophotograpy immediately, I'm considering deferring the purchase of the equatorial mount for later, and this leads to my questions:

Is this wise? Particularly, would I be burning money on a cheap mount that will be redundant when I get the "real" one?

Assuming that it is wise, what would people recommend?

Thanks,
Damien