What is the Best All Round Telescope?

The best all round telescope would zoom into the planets with ferocious detail and be fat enough to reveal the huge faint whispy deep space nebula and galaxies whilst being small enough to put on a tracking mount for astrophotography. I asked fellow nerds from all over the world if such a scope exists…

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After consulting with many geeks we came to the conclusion that the Celestron SCT series gets closest to this dream.If you’re not into photographing wide field deep space nebula then you can save about 30-15% on your bill and plump for the XLT series, if you want to go all in then you’ll want the virtually apochromatic across the full field HD Edge series.

The SCT is fat and short. It’s fatness gives it fantastic resolving power which is why it’s the scope of choice for the world’s best planetary photographers and also makes it a good light bucket. Its shortness makes the SCT much easier to handle and hide from Mrs Biscuit and much, much easier to mount than a similarly fat Newtonian telescope for astrophotography.

Best All Rounder

Celestron 11″ Edge HD

According to optical expert Es Ried Celestron’s HD Edge telescopes are…” virtually apochromatic across the entire field… a very nice system”

Pop in the dedicated 0.7 reducer and you have a full frame astrograph. Pop in a 2.5x barlow and you have a planet buster. You can also put the camera on the front with the help of a hyperstar lens for seriously fast wide field astrophotography. Its a genuine allrounder and its small enough to be handled happily by one of the best value mounts on the market today: the Sky-Watcher EQ6-R PRO Go-To

For those who are interested in the HD Edge here is a detailed account of how Celestron upgraded their classic SCT into the HD Edge (note they kept the spherical primary mirror!).

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Best Value All rounder

Celestron C9.25 XLT

The reason why this is the best value all round telescope telescope is because most of the time its very nearly as good as the Celestron 11″ Edge HD but its less than half the price!

When viewing or shooting planets 90% of the time in most places in the world (not Florida’s east coast actually but definitely in the UK) the wobbly atmosphere will limit what you can see rendering the 11″ and this C9.25 very close bed fellows.

Telescopes like these which have a pretty long focal ratio are very good at shooting galaxies but of course galaxies tend to just fill the centre of the image so you don’t really need the full frame flat apochromatic field that you get from the HD Edge.

And finally the optical advantage of the HD Edge is lost if you choose to use a hyperstar lens for wide field imaging as both the XLT and the HD edge have a spherical primary mirror.

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Sct’s range in size for 6-14 inches fat. They are all good, the bigger ones are better but the bigger ones have disadvantages too. Obviously they are more expensive, they demand a bigger and better mount to keep them steady for deep space astrophotography (not such a big deal for observational and planetary astrophotography) , they are more often limited in their resolution by the wobbly atmosphere AND as I discovered when I hired the whopping C14 HD Edge telescope for 6 months, the C14 really is so big that setting it up is a real mission. I think the C14 is only for those who are insane or for those who plan on keeping the giant scope in an observatory. If I had all the money in the world I would plump for a Celestron 11″ Edge HD which is MUCH more portable than the C14 and therefore much more likely to be used and it can work on a relatively cheap but very good mount like the Sky-Watcher EQ6-R PRO Go-To. In terms of value for money I’d say the Celestron C9.25 XLT is hard to beat.

The following video shows what a 14inch sct is capable of ( I think that with the seeing in the UK being quite poor an 11inch SCT would give similar views.

Other telescopes to consider

You could argue that a fancy glass refractor makes space look more contrasty and you’d be right. Which is why some people prefer to spend their money on better optics at the expense of a larger aperture. These scopes won’t show you as much but what you see will look crisper. If this floats your boat I would argue a simple 4 or 5 inch doublet with fancy glass is hard to beat.

Sky-Watcher 120ED

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Best all rounder for under £200

See Andromeda Galaxy, Orion Nebula, Milky Way
and still good on the planets.

If you want a budget scope that is good at cruising along the milky way and bagging some of the larger deep space targets like the Andromeda Galaxy and the Orion Nebula as well as being great on the moon and the planets then you’re in luck because not only is the classic 80mm f5 refractor cheap it also hits an optical sweet spot… it really is a winner.

This 5 minute section of my video runs through what this simple little telescope is capable of.

(FYI Celestron don’t sell this model anymore but that’s ok bc the factory in china that makes it sells this model to other companies (also since I made the video the price has gone up😂)

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The Skywatcher Startravel-80mm (aka ST80) and the Meade Adventure Scope 80mm (and Meade 80mm infinity package – which comes with a better tripod) and the old Celestron ST80 and old Orion 80ST are made by Synta in China. Apart from the labels and add ons these are the same scopes (BE CAREFUL don’t buy the latest Celestron travel scope. It is – I believe – inferior ). Each is a simple, cheap, two lens design called an achromatic doublet. Good 80mm achromatic doublets hit an optical sweet spot. Whilst larger achromatic doublet designs suffer from noticeable purple fringing this small 80mm scope controls the fringing well. The reason could be that the small 80mm lenses are easier to manufacture to very high standards or because the 80mm lens’ relatively low usable magnification is unable to resolve the fringing. Either way this scope rocks and is a keeper even for mega nerds like me!

This little refractor will show you craters within craters on the moon, Saturn’s rings, Jupiter’s four Galilean moons, at least two of Jupiter’s bands and on a calm night the great red spot. But that’s not all. This little scope’s speciality is sucking in lots of light from a wide area to reveal big, dim, wide field deep space nebula. With a low magnification eyepiece look for the faint but gobsmakingly colossal oval that is the Andromeda galaxy (M31) or the dazzling Seven Sisters star cluster (M45) or the wisps of cloud around the Orion nebula (M42). It is of course hard to see these in the city but this scope’s small size and low price make it the perfect scope to sling into a rucksack and take somewhere dark.