First thing

You will need is a good sturdy mount. Any Dob up to 250mm can use an HEQ5. 300mm or greater use a HEQ6 (pictured)

Goto or No Goto

Lets face it for Lunar Planetary work you dont need Goto. All you need is drives in both axis for manual guiding. If you cant find the moon and planets you may need to start the hobby from scratch.

This will save you money too.

Save Money...

Dont buy dedicated telescope weights. Use some lateral thinking and buy cheaper weights and Securing screws. Here the Leviathan has an aditional 2 x 10 pounds from a local store.

A tricky one...

Tube rings can be supplied or made. Any tube from 300mm and up may have difficulty aquiring rings. Be careful this can be a costly excercise. Make your own if you can.

Cooling

Large Dobs need to be cooled to get the best from them. A fan attchment (even an old PC fan) will be a big help.

Finder Scope

Another essential, Make sure you have an 8x50 or 9x50 to find the fainter planets and give good centering at high power.

Focuser

For a Dob this NEEDs to be LOW PROFILE. You may have trouble getting anything into focus even with barlows and especially if you use a filter wheel. a 10:1 knob will be very useful too.This is an essential worth paying for.

Barlow

Yes, horses for coarses but a £80 apo barlow can give as good results as some of the high end ones. Here is a prfered choice of mine the Celestron Ultima.

A filter wheel

This is essential for Monochrome imagers only. Adding this to a Dob will affect focus. Here is a £70 manual wheel that does the job just as fine as the more pricey ones.

The Camera

Be it a Toucam, Luminara or DMK this is an essential.

Here to get the best compromise of performance and budget a Mono DMK 21AU is used with great results.

The Optics

A view of the mirrors

The Leviathan

Fully assembled.

Ready for action

Just need a clear night.

Me at SGL4 lucksall park

Pictured with Leviathan.