What gives most optical performance for a given budget?
Usually, a big Dobson. (D) Though costly and cumbersome, small refractors are durable and difficult to get out of whack. Good ones make respectable beginner instruments, particularly for beginners with extra thumbs. And a good small refractor provides a wonderful way for an experienced observer to embarrass folks with humungeous Newtonians who lack observing skills to exploit them. But BEWARE of mass-marketed junk refractors, advertised as high-power and sold in department stores. (E) Altazimuth mountings tend to be cheaper, lighter, less clumsy, and more quickly set up than equatorial ones, but to use one you must be willing to learn the sky well enough to find things without dialing in celestial coordinates. (Computer-controlled altazimuth mounts allow use of celestial coordinates to find things, or perhaps will look up the coordinates for you, in an internal data base, but they are not cheap.) (F) There’s another way to look at this material. There are variety of ecological niches f
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- What gives most optical performance for a given budget?
