At 2006-01-09 14:38:51 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Do you want to do the Moon, stars, the planets, or nebula?
"Yes" :-) Seriously, I think I'd spend most of my time on stars and planets. I'm not hoping for much in the way of nebulae, beyond looking at M42 and a couple of other easy-to-see ones. The moon I can already observe with my 20x binoculars. > I was wondering whether you're a candidate for a refractor, a > reflector, or a Maksutov-Cassegrain, What I had in mind was a smallish (75-100mm) reflecting telescope in a Dobsonian mount. I'm not averse to putting things together myself, but I thought grinding and silvering the mirror was beyond me (for now). So I've been looking at kits like the ones featured here: http://www.galileotelescope.com http://www.sharpvisionindia.com A Maksutov-Cassegrain would be ideal, but the ones I've seen are all quite expensive, and I gather they're not exactly easy to make (but perhaps I could get a kit with just the optics; I haven't looked). > whether you need automatic tracking, computer control, and a > (chilled?) CCD camera. Beyond my wildest dreams. I wasn't even seriously hoping to be able to hook up my SLR (unsuitable as it is for long exposures) to it. Should I be? Wouldn't any sort of photography need automatic tracking? Can I put something to accomplish that together easily? > Will this need to be portable? Which kind of car do you have? Portability is essential. I have a Swift <http://www.marutiswift.com> (it's an Indianised version of the Suzuki Swift, and I'm extremely impressed with it so far, after having taken it on a 1250km drive to the Himalayas a week or so ago). > Can you access unpolluted (aerosols and city lights) observation > spaces easily? Not easily, which is why portability is important. I can get to the desert in a few hours' driving, or to the mountains in a day or so. It turns out that a friend has an 200mm reflector gathering dust across town, and I can borrow it. The scope and stand are monstrously large. I can just about imagine lugging them along on an overnight star-watching trip to Rajasthan, but there's no way I could take them to the hills (I would have a lot of other luggage on a longer trip). In practice, I suspect it would spend most of its time on my roof. Far from ideal viewing conditions, but on otherwise clear nights, I guess the humongous aperture would make up for all that. So I'm still interested in a small and high-quality alternative. -- ams
