What type of hobbies do you have?

[egoldstein]

Thanks for the advice & recommendations. I've been leaning towards a reflector or compound scope for portability: any suggestions on good starter scopes of those types?

​Not in the same price range, no. At the small end of the scale (under 6"), reflectors are a little hampered by the secondary mirror's size and are usually paired with an equatorial mount, which tends to make them more expensive or of cheaper build. A lot of relatively good reflectors are ruined IMO by being paired with a cheap, wobbly EQ mount. I love dobsonians as reflectors, but they're usually 6" and up and not typically what one would consider portable.
For portabiliy, a spotting scope or binoculars are handiest. I have used my 8x50 finder scope more often than the 12" reflector it's supposed to be mounted on. For a telescope, an ALT-AZ mount (altitude / azimuth (up down/side to side)) is going to be the lightest and most portable as the counterweights on an equatorial are always going to make it significantly heavier and more expensive. For the most part, Celestron and Orion are reliable brands, but some of the no-name telescopes are fair. With most of the cheap scopes, the weakest link is almost always the mount, which is one of the things I really like with the Celestron Astro Master as the mount isn't a cheap afterthought. Second to suffer from cutting corners are the eyepieces, which is a shame because it greatly affects the viewing.
For anyone interested enough to seek out something better than the Celestrons I mentioned, I can't recommend the forums at www.cloudynights.com highly enough. This is really one of those areas that if you intend to spend more than a couple hundred dollars or have specific goals in mind (I'm looking at you, astrophotography) that time spent researching will save enormous amounts of money and frustration.
I feel like I'm hijacking this, so anyone with further interest should PM me or better yet, create an astronomy thread where I can babble on without derailing. [img]<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/smile.png[/img]
 
Speaking of derailing, we're in the Dog Days of Summer right now. Did you know that the Dog Days begin when the star Sirius, the dog star, starts rising before the Sun? It was believed that it contributed to the heat of summer and caused all sorts of issues. Crazy, eh?  [img]<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/tongue.png[/img]