[X] My Assistant

[aggieastronaut]

My first telescope is a Meade ETX70-AT, and while I love it, it's time to move up! I purposely bought a house 30 minutes from my campus just to have the dark skies (and boy are they dark! Naked eye Milky Way dust...). Any telescope suggestions?

I would prefer to stick with Meade because I have a lot of accessories. I'm looking at the 8" LX90-ACF. It's in the right price range. Anyone have astrophotography experience with this one? I bought a DSLR (Olympus E500) for astrophotography purposes, but the camera mount no longer exists for the ETX70-AT.

[mcaplinger]

I would prefer to stick with Meade because I have a lot of accessories. I'm looking at the 8" LX90-ACF. It's in the right price range. Anyone have astrophotography experience with this one?

As usual it depends on what you want to do with it. This is an acceptable scope for astrophotography, although more aperture would be better for deep-sky and this may be overkill for anything you can do with a DSLR (uncooled, you'll be limited to fairly short exposures). I'm not a huge fan of the Schmidt-Cassegrain or fork mounts, but it's the easiest way to get a relatively portable telescope. Meade and Celestron are probably about equal in quality and both are somewhat overpriced IMHO.

For more visually-oriented use, I would suggest something like a 12" Dobsonian, but it would be useless for astrophotography.

For general observing, I kinda like the Celestron NexStar 6. If I had to get Meade, I'd probably get an ETX-125, but it's too bad they don't make a little larger Maksutov.

Unfortunately having had access to professional telescopes over the years has ruined me for ever getting anything this small myself, but YMMV.