i want a new telescope. about a decade and a half ago i fulfilled a lifelong ambition of grinding and polishing a mirror. built a dobsonian mount and have done a little, very little observing, because of the difficulty of pointing the thing. besides the sonotube construction just makes it feel flimsy.
so i'm in the market for a new scope and have a bit of cash to spend on it. i've been looking at schmidt/cassegrains due to the portability factor and when i ran this by a friend who has a $25,000 dobson/newton with binocular eyepieces, slaved to a laptop and has a heated digital temp readout coffee cup holder on it, he said i'd get much brighter and better images from a reflector.
so i've been doing a lot of reading, looking at orion, meade, and celestron mainly. i like the idea of goto, but then there's the intelliscope which has a readout which goes to zero as you manually push the scope, instead of using battery sucking motors to do it for you.
700 bucks gets you a ten inch aperture. i wouldn't exactly say it was grab and go because it weighs 70 lbs. a computerized motorized version is probably a third as much more.
anybody familiar with this class of instrument? i want to do both planetary and deep sky observing, and i know that will involve a compromise somewhere along the line, whether in focal ratio and configuration. i don't know about astrophotography. might be a whole other issue.