Cheers Dave.

 

I had corned beef and mustard sandwiches. It's a crazy one degree Celsius here.

 

This was Waitrose corned beef. Expensive, but worth it.

 

I'll send them over on the next Concorde. I've been looking at the superdupermoon with the Orion SkyGlow and a 40mm Plossl for about 31x. It looks good, I used the violet filter as well.

 

For a good all rounder I'd think about an inexpensive achromat around 7 ~ 10cm. I have four Mak's but they're really only good for lunar/planetary, which they excel at. Brighter DSO's are good with Mak's as are some open clusters and the like. It's not easy to get exit pupils larger than around 3mm though.



This was my (Synta) Orion ST80 before I upgraded its focuser to a 2" TS Optics (GSO) Crayford rail. Orion have stopped distributing the ST80 but Sky-Watcher still do. I have a Sky-Watcher ST80 as well although I replaced it with the Orion as its dew shield was hard to remove and the focuser screws seemed dodgy.



The main problem with the ST80 was finding a suitable mount/tripod combination that I could use easily considering my disability. The SW ST80 came with an EQ1 but I thought it was too flimsy so I used a spare EQ2 with the EQ1 counterweight. EQ mounts are great for plane of the ecliptic, especially lunar/planetary, but difficult for me for the zenith. I tried an SW AZ3 but it just wasn't up to the job and went with a Vixen Porta II and Hal130 tripod.



The GSO 2-speed focuser is really good and I bought the ES 14mm eyepiece especially for the ST80 when I use it on an AZ5 mount in 1.25" mode.



It took me a while to get everything sorted, and it cost me more than I thought it would, but it all worked out relatively fine.



However, the ST80 will suffer from chromatic aberration which can be noticeable at high magnifications. One way of ameliorating this is to use a minus cyan filter like the Baader Fringe Killer. Although for low power sweeping of star fields and the like it isn't necessary.

There's nothing as sharp and crisp as a refractor, even a relatively inexpensive one. I've got magnifications of 167x on Saturn and Jupiter and even 171x on the Moon.

What the ST80 really excels at though is low power wide angle viewing. The 16mm T5 Nagler and 19mm Panoptic are incredible on the ST80 and in 2" mode The 31mm and 36mm Baader Aspherics and 19mm Luminos are quite breathtaking.

 

Orion have stopped distributing the ST80 Dave, I think they've replaced it with something cheaper. There is an 80mm Meade which is more or less identical to the ST80. From what I've heard the GSO focuser replacements fit them. Plus, the mount/tripod looks far more usable than the SW equivalent. It's worth checking out in case something happens to my Orion and I don't want to replace it with a Sky-Watcher. I'm guessing the doublet is JOC, so high quality.

https://www.meade.com/infinity-80mm-altazimuth-refractor.html



I think if I had to plump for one small scope it would have to be something like the ST80 or this Meade, as it can do planetary and wide field. Albeit there are certain problems. I don't know whether there are any Meade Infinity scopes that are sold as just OTA's though. If you replaced the focuser with the GSO it can be rotated so as to place the dovetail in the correct place for a Vixen style mount. In that way you wouldn't need tube rings.



Of course, the ideal solution is to get a nice mount and then get a small Mak and a small frac lol.

 

Yeah, it's not got particularly good reviews from what I've heard. I think the focuser and the mount isn't that good. I can get the Meade for about 140 quid here, the 80ST is about 120 quid. The SW ST80/EQ1 is about 130 quid.

If I was buying an OTA/mount tripod combination now I'd go for the Meade Infinity.