Hello,
Seeing outer space live is the bees knees for me. Knowing what your looking at keeps you at the eyepiece for longer imo.
I really like the idea of a table top as suggested for portability and having a nice small foot print.
As your budget is $3k and viewing location limited. I was going to suggest a 127mm mak on a table top. Retail for $980 and has the Freedom Find dual encoder technology etc.
As your probably going to be looking mostly at the moon, planets, double stars, clusters and the brightest of the gaseous DSO objects. This scope would be very good for those objects.
Hopefully Martin will talk about pro's and con's of the 127mm mak, and if its worth another 50% jump in price.
Steve
Ps. You might find this of interest.
http://www.deepskywatch.com/Articles...telescope.html