I Like
your combo.
Now
here is another fun scope that my wife designed and built in a day. We
call it our Kiddie Scope (built for our 4 year old). A common question we
get is ... Does that really work? Yes it does. It's made with with a
Meade 4.5" F8 spherical mirror, Lumicon helical focuser, 1" secondary, Orion EZ
Finder, and about 4 lbs of counterweight as the origional design was way too
light. Overall, the entire scope including the counterweights is about
10-12 lbs.
John Zeigler
Aloha
Big scopes are nice BUT they do as
you said create problems (weight, storage,transport,mount) and with the long
focal length create a narrow field of view. Again, one scope to do
everything (wide field to deep observing AND bright) good
luck. The solution in my opinion is to get a wide field refractor and
mount it on the main scope. My old C-8 has an inexpensive 80mm refractor
from Orion and sometimes is more fun than my C-8 or my 12.5, so get two scopes,
it'll cost less and be much more fun.
Aloha from Dark Skys
Maui
Rob
PS Here's how the C-8/ST-80 look