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Come join the friendliest, most engaging and inclusive astronomy forum geared for beginners and advanced telescope users, astrophotography devotees, plus check out our "Astro" goods vendors.
Get an Orion six-inch f/4 fast Newtonian. They can't weigh more than 20 pounds without a piggyback (I have my Meade 70mm f/5 mounted on my six-incher - something else you might consider but the Meade 70mm f/5 astrographs are relatively high dollar) and you won't see any real difference in resolving power anyway under less than perfect skies and the six-inchers are cheaper! 8-inch f/4 Newtonians are going to weigh between 28 and 30 pounds.
Believe it or not, I picked my "little" Orion 6 f/4 up on sale, new, for $299 on clearance! Look around and wait patiently, these little six-inch f/4 fast Newtonians are very powerful imaging tools. But be warned, you will have to know how to collimate them or at least keep the factory collimation trued up. Pretty steep learning curve on that but very rewarding when you finally have the special collimation steps down pat. There are good online tutorials on collimating fast Newtonians. Read them first before you purchase one and I'm sure there are any number of members on TSS who can efficiently explain how it's done. Collimating an f/4 Newtonian is a bit different and more difficult than even an f/5 or f/6. And f/8s are easy-peasy from my own experience.
Just plug "Pickering scale" into any online search engine like Google or whatnot, Steve. It's a one to ten scale and it's a relative measure of seeing conditions. In fact, there are sites which give a visual aid for each step on the scale so you can compare it to the star images you are visually seeing through a telescope. You won't be able to divine seeing conditions through a telephoto on your camera. The less a star image "shimmers" the higher on the Pickering scale is your basic seeing conditions. Sky transparency and sky darkness are measured different ways. I believe the Bortle scale (a one to nine scale) measures sky brightness/darkness which is not the same as transparency, though they are roughly related to one another. There are members here who use the Bortle scale to describe the skies they imaged under.
Telescopes: Meade LX90 10-inch f/10 UHC Coma-free SCT; Explore Scientific 127mm f/7.5 APO ED triplet refractor; Explore Scientific 102mm f/7 APO ED triplet refractor; Explore Scientific 80mm f/6 APO ED triplet refractor; Skywatcher 72mm f/6 ED Schott doublet refractor; Meade 70mm f/5 APO quadruplet astrograph refractor; Skywatcher Quattro 8-inch f/4 Newtonian astrograph; Orion 6-inch f/4 Newtonian astrograph; Skywatcher SkyMax 180mm f/15 Maksutov; iOptron 150mm f/12 Maksutov; Orion f/9 Ritchey-Chretien RC astrograph Eyepieces: Set of 7 Baader Hyperion eyepieces, 3 Meade 5000 glass handgrenades; 1970s era Japanese manufactured Meade 12.5mm Orthoscopic, and too many other eclectic eyepieces to list Mounts: Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro mount; Orion Atlas EQ-G mount Post-production Software: Not good enough … oh, okay ... Canon's proprietary CanoScan ArcSoft 9000F photoshop suite
