Telescopes
Orion Optics DX250
This telescope was made by Orion Optics a UK based company in Cheshire who provide high quality mirrors and telescopes to amature astronomers. The telescope here is an older model now out of production but is basically the same as their current Europa range of telescopes. With an f ratio of 4.8 and large apature of 250mm this large newtonian reflector is ideally suited to imaging and observing faint nebulae and DSO. The original plan was to use this as an imaging platform with my canon 300D. If there was one problem with the telescope it was its pretty flimsy thin aluminium tube and frankly crap focusser(i've heard these ae better on the newer models). A large mount is required to use this scope(the main reason i no longer have this scope), I used the Skywatcher EQ6 which you can see below. Also I found the cooldown time an issue as the weather is very unpredictable in Scotland and I couldnt afford to wait an hour for my telescope to cool.
Celestron GP-C102
My second telescope I picked this up second hand for a couple of hundred pounds with a vixen GP mount. I did quite alot of research into this scope before I bought it, here is what i discovered. The scope was made in the early 90's by vixen a japanese high end telescope company and then rebadged as a celestron and sold as a package with the vixen GP mount. Vixen also made a fluorite version(GP-102FL) apparently one of the sharpest APO's ever made. My copy of the scope is an f/9.8 doublet achromat and as such shows some false colour around bright stars but is relatively well suppressed on planets. The scope shows an almost perfect star test and shows incredible amounts of detail on saturn the cassini division is easily resolved above 100x magnification on most nights. My main motivation for buying a refractor was the low cooldown times and this scope does indeed cool fast. From inside my house to outside I reckon it takes 15 minutes to cool. I do not plan to do any serious imaging with this scope as it shows too much false colour(perfectly acceptable when doing visual work but shows quite alot in images) and it is a relatively slow telescope. I usually piggyback my canon 300mm on this and use the celestron as a guide scope. Its also worth noting how solid the telescope feels and the level of craftsmanship is superb. The baffles seem to be well placed and effective and I have not had any problems with the foccuser that I encountered on the orion. Obviously such a small telescope 100mm apature is not going to show you as much in DSO but I rarely observe galaxies visually prefering to image them. Where it really shines though is on planets where incredible amounts of detail can be seen. The polar caps and surface features on mars are easily made out in good seeing as are the various rings and bands on saturn.