Chuck Hards wrote:
Patrick, you get up here in the hotseat with Brent and I.
I think my previous comment already has me there. :-) But, what the hey, maybe just to throw fuel on the fire, I'll also add that in my quarter century of selling scope at the HP I never had a return on any of the orange telescopes. Same held true even after they went to those yucky dark colors. Alas, the same could not be said for the other brands we sold. But, to be fair, as long as I was in charge, we only sold the higher end scopes and left the cheepies to other stores in the area. Also, I've been out of the business for a couple of years now and things may have changed.
You've done more imaging than about anyone I know, both emulsion-based and CCD, and done most of it with SCT's. What are you doing right now? Positional astronomy mostly? Deep imaging? What can you tell us about your experience with this equipment? At the moment I'm not doing a whole lot of astronomy. Taking a bit of a break. But just before the break I was probably 99% CCD and 80%+ of that was chasing asteroids (astrometry) and measuring star brightnesses (photometry).
Patrick