Sorry if this has been asked and answered before - I searched, but didn't find anything that seemed to match. (I'm new here - be kind to me!
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My father has had a life-long passion for amateur astronomy, but he has been "scope-less" for quite a few years now. He has just gone and bought a Meade 8” LX90 ACF
http://www.meade.com/lx90 , which is a lovely instrument, but is very heavy and bulky for someone of his advancing years to move around. (According to the specs, it weighs about 24 kg on the tripod.) He is getting quite old and frail, so I shudder to think of him trying to move it in and out of his unit – he will surely end up injuring either himself, or the scope, or both.
I’ve been thinking that what he needs is a Tripod Dolly - something like the WT600 Tripod Dolly (with locking castors) that you can find on ebay for around $50; e.g.:
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/WT600-Uni...08d4ab0&_uhb=1
I’m hoping that the dolly would make it possible to manoeuvre through a standard doorway – it is a 3-legged “spider” which sits directly under the tripod legs, with no rigid platform of its own, so it might be possible by rotating two legs around the door jamb. If it’s too big to pivot through a standard doorway frame, his garage opens up to a nice, fairly flat driveway with good sky view (if there’s such a thing as a “good sky view” in Brisbane!), so I’m thinking it could “live” in the garage, and just get pushed out onto the driveway for use.
I’m interested to hear from someone who actually owns a telescope of this size, and has to move it outdoors to use – how do you manoeuvre yours around – brute force, or do you have some sort of “cunning plan”?