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Originally posted by exponent
reply to post by ngchunter
Originally posted by ngchunter
10,000 Euros you say. Not sure if you're trying to include the permanent observatory building costs in that or not.
The baseline price was about a quarter million dollars (to be fair, that's including scopes), and I know for a fact he's dumped even more money into it since then. Now, you don't have to go nearly as fancy as he went, but I think 10,000 might be a bit on the tight side of building your own fully remote controllable observatory.
It's usually much easier and cheaper to build an observatory you can operate at least partially "on-site," whether you build a roll-off shed type:
...
but of course if you live in the middle of a major city you're going to fighting light pollution.
First you want the best mount your budget can afford, I would say that would probably get this (about 7000 euros):
www.rothervalleyoptics.co.uk...
The quarter million dollar observatory I helped with uses two of these, they work well as long as you don't load them up with heavy equipment close to their weight limits, leave them out of balance, or let them get hit by lightning. In other words, common sense and careful use. Celestron's been good about under-warranty repairs and replacements too in my experience.
Originally posted by exponent
Originally posted by ngchunter
10,000 Euros you say. Not sure if you're trying to include the permanent observatory building costs in that or not.
I'm not. I'll build this by hand and I expect it will take me a few months!
My intention is to only build it 500m or so from the property, but to try and avoid as much vibration and environmental light as possible. I'm looking at the middle of normandy at the moment, and the skies should be nice and dark.
That's much more impressive than I planned! I have some experience with celestron hardware and it seems to be pretty decent quality. Having said that you have also specced up a camera which I intend to be part of a second purchase. I'll be buying some gigantic large format one eventually, but just using a T2i or some IR filter removed SLR until then.
Ideally I'm looking for just the mount and OTA (plus a guide scope etc) and perhaps a secondary refractor or similar. I'm only experienced with small scale astronomy, but I would love to be able to do some nice quality images of planets with a CCD on a refractor, and some DSOs with an SCT. Do you think the guide scope you specified would be 'good enough'? The only guide scope I have has less power than my binoculars
If we were to increase the budget to €14k, leaving €7k for the optical parts, what would you say then? Don't worry about sundries like attachment plates etc, if I can't mill them myself then extra €100 costs are easily absorbed.
Thanks again for the help. If I end up working this out and building it, you're welcome anytime.
Originally posted by exponent
reply to post by ngchunter
This is a fantastic series of recommendations and bits of info I didn't have before. However, I fear that having seen this I can't wait to be able to buy something. If I was to irresponsibly order a Takahashi 85EDX, what mount would you recommend? The 450mm focal length isn't really suitable for anything but well stabilised tracking imaging in my eyes, but I am a very basic amateur.
I would rather not spend insane money on something that won't have an eventual use, but that telescope is attractive and available in the UK (although at €4000+ it seems) and so very very tempting.