quote:

A used Questor is under $3000. Small, self-contained solar filter (Ultra Important to use when solar viewing)and zoom eyepiece, clock drive (car battery will work) and in a carry case. Powerful enough to see the division of Saturn's rings. Will accept (with adaptor) many brands of cameras.
Its folded optics, if unfolded would make it about 33" long. Also excellent for birding and other terrestrial sights.
Good luck.

quote:

Originally posted by ccmdfd:
Ask which telescope companies are the best and you are going to get widely different opinions based upon owners' experiences and biases.

All of this is made worse because most consumers don't know what's really going on with manufacturers. They don't release a lot of info. Thus there's a ton of speculation.

Orion, Sky Watcher, and Celestron are Chinese made scopes, and I believe all are actually made at the same plant (Synta). There are some differences between them. For instance, the computer programs which run their go to mounts are slightly different.

While they are relatively cheap and Chinese, they are generally well received and there's a metric ton of them out there being used nightly with good results.

Kind of like Glocks.
I wouldn't go for anything cheaper than any of those.

Meade, Explore Scientific, and William Optics are also Chinese scopes, but from a different optical plant. There are many who feel like these three are better than Synta products, but also many who feel they are all the same.

Stellarvue is a US company, which apparently imports its optical tubes from China, but then goes over them and adjusts issues, or rejects ones which don't meet their standards. They also apparently make some of their own in-house.

Again, a lot of this is conjecture, these companies don't spell most of this out.

Getting to some serious $ now.

Televue (mentioned as a good scope by another member earlier in the thread)is a higher end company. Many steps above all of the others I've listed so far.

Takahashi is a Japanese brand which is also on the high end of things.

Astrophysics and TEC are both small, American companies which are making scopes here in the US. They are majorly expensive and in the case of Astrophysics, there's a 10 year waiting list to get a new one from the company (used ones show up on the classifieds though)

I started with a Celestron NexStar 6SE. It's got a great computerized go to system to get you on your target, and can do things like take you on surveys of objects.

It gives great views of the Moon, and planets (Venus, Jupiter, Saturn). Never tried the Sun.

Nowadays i'm primarily doing astrophotography and it's pretty useless for that. So I'm running a Takahashi.

Personally, if you are brand new, and not sure how much you are going to want to do, there's nothing wrong with starting off with one of the Chinese Synta products.

If you're looking at solar system objects, either a good refractor or SCT would work well. If you want galaxies and nebula and such, a large reflecting scope would typically work better (with a lot of variables to consider though)

You can find them used on classifieds, but also many of the larger online telescope dealers will have some used ones for sale which were traded in.

Check out OPT and High Point Scientific and Woodland Hills.

Best of luck
cc