Choosing
The largest telescope is not the one that shows most; the largest telescope that gets carried outside is. This guide reads aperture against the figures that decide whether it leaves the house — heaviest single part, whether the tube collapses, and how many trips it takes.
Heaviest single part. It appears on almost none of the listings on this site, and it is the number that decides whether a large Dobsonian is used monthly or annually. Where a maker does publish a packed weight, this site quotes it.
A truss or FlexTube design shortens the tube for transport and then has to be re-collimated, or at least checked, each time it is extended. That is a few minutes at the start of a session, against a tube that will not fit in a car at all.
A catadioptric puts 1500 mm of focal length into a tube a third that length. The optics are more compact; the mount usually is not, and on a computerised fork the tripod is the part that decides the trip count.
Where a padded case is cut for a specific tube, the listing says so. A bag sized for a 200/1200 Newtonian is a different object from a universal one, and the difference shows the first time it is carried across a dark field.
203 mm aperture · 1200 mm focal length
A 203/1200 Newtonian on a Dobsonian base — the largest aperture in this group, sold with an accessory set and a mount with nothing to align.
Best for: The observer who has decided that aperture matters more than portability
≈ €529
130 mm parabolic mirror · 650 mm focal length
A 130/650 parabolic Newtonian on a wooden tabletop Dobsonian base, with a collapsible tube, a red dot finder and two eyepieces.
Best for: Somebody who wants a real 130 mm mirror that stores in a cupboard
≈ £264 / €273
130 mm parabolic mirror · 650 mm focal length
A 130/650 Newtonian with a parabolic primary on an EQ-320 mount, with a 1.25 in focuser, a tracking drive and an illuminated LED finder.
Best for: A first serious deep-sky instrument for somebody prepared to collimate it
≈ €409
127 mm Maksutov · 1500 mm focal length
A 127/1500 Maksutov-Cassegrain on the AZ-GTi Wi-Fi GoTo mount, controlled from a phone rather than a handset.
Best for: Lunar, planetary and double-star observing from a small or awkward site
≈ £649 / €784
Cut for a 200/1200 Newtonian · thick foam · balanced handles
A bag made to fit one telescope — a 200/1200 Newtonian — with thick foam, a water-repellent shell and handles placed over the packed centre of gravity.
Best for: A 200/1200 Newtonian that is carried to a dark site regularly
≈ £112 / €126
Light collected goes with the area, so 203 mm gathers about two and a half times what 130 mm does. On faint objects that is the difference between a smudge and a shape.
Because the telescope is carried in pieces. A 30 kg instrument that splits into three 10 kg parts goes outside; a 20 kg one that does not split may not.
Partly. A Maksutov or Schmidt-Cassegrain puts a long focal length in a short tube, which is easier to carry, but the mount it needs is usually where the weight returns.
Any figure written into the body of this page was true on the day it was written. The amount shown next to each instrument is requested from the retailer as the page loads, and it is that amount, not the text, that stands.
Telescopes and mounts are discounted over and over through the year — hardest of all in the weeks before Christmas, which is exactly when most of them are bought — and a struck-through figure on its own says nothing whatever about what the same model was charged at four weeks ago. UniverTrack keeps a week-by-week record for each retailer, so a discount is measured against a figure somebody genuinely paid instead of one invented for the sale — and it says when the moment to buy has genuinely arrived.
