Oh my gear!
Pretty much every amateur astronomer has one thing in common, besides an interest in astronomy. GEAR! Man, do we love our equipment. Some get obsessed with the biggest scope (there’s even a brand of HUGE scopes that embrace this), some get intensely focused (did I mention I love puns?) on the quality and precision of the instruments resolving power. Then there’s the astro-photographers, the DSO (deep sky object) aficionados, the star splitters, technophiles (who would ideally have thought controlled computerized tracking systems), Luddites (who only want to do everything as it was done 50 years ago), planetary enthusiasts (like me), comet hunters and a few oddballs that get into stuff like amateur spectroscopy, which I happen to find very interesting. Most amateurs are a collage of these types, which make most of them fairly interesting and unique. Every single one of them gets revved up over whatever kind of stuff thy happen to have and I’m no exception.
My main scope is currently an 8″ Celestron SCT (purchased as an 8SE) with a Moonlite focuser and sitting on an iOptron PR-GEM mount. It’s on the big side of portable , but I can still lift the entire thing (mounted and assembled) and move it around, which is my definition of “portable”. I also have a bunch of little mods to make it slightly more useful, like a Baader finderscope and Televue diagonal. Plus a bunch of good quality eyepieces, which I’ll probably go into detailing at some point in the future.
History is made at night 
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