[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.

[aggieastronaut]

I was considering the ETX125 for quite awhile but I like the GPS and autoalign feature of the LX series. It got really, REALLY annoying to try and align my ETX70, so I gave up and manually operated my telescope.

This telescope wouldn't be for exclusive astrophotography use. I do a lot of outreach on campus and drag my telescope around to various star parties. For astrophotography I would focus on planet imaging, so deep sky stuff wouldn't be too important (although I will admit, I would certainly try to image some fainter stuff like M42, Neptune, etc. because I think it'd be awesome!)

Does the LXD require manually aligning it? I can't find a yes or no answer on the sites I looked at. I don't mind the AutoStar remote, but I absolutely hated and got really frustrated with the manual alignment because I could never, ever get it right.

And yes, this would be my Christmas present. It'd be my only one, but my parents already bought me a brand new house and car... what else do I need?

[dvandorn]

...my parents already bought me a brand new house and car... what else do I need?

Ummm... an adopted brother? I'm available for adoption...



-the other Doug