As a casual backyard astronomer who's been through several scopes in the past decade or so, I can heartily recommend those Orion Maks (Maksutov-Cassergrain) from telescope.com to anyone looking to buy a good but inexpensive scope. They're really nice little scopes. Extremely flexible too, as they work very well as terrestrial scopes (spotting scopes) too, which is why I'd recommend them to a beginner. You can't use a dobson for anything other than astronomy. But you can use a Mak for terrestrial viewing, even as a huge telephoto lens for most cameras.
I have had an
Apex 90 for several years and it's been a darn good scope. With a few good eyepieces it's great for lightweight astronomy. Think the moon, planets, comets, bright messiers, etc. It works really well as a spotting scope too, as it's small, compact and the optics don't flip the image. I have an lens adapter for my Nikon DSLR and it's awesome as a huge telephoto lens for wildlife photography. The 90mm is pretty good but if I had to do it all over again I'd get a 127 (M60 vs M80 discussion
). Lots more light-gathering (though nothing like an 8" dob).
I can even attest that Orion's tech support is good. The focuser was messed up on the first one that I received. An actual human being that spoke english picked up on the second ring to their tech support 800 number. Within 5 minutes I was talking to one of their experts. 10 minutes of troubleshooting with him deemed that it was indeed defective. Within 3 days I had a new (perfect) scope and a pre-paid return box for the bad one.
Several years ago I had a Meade ETX-70. Not the greatest optics, but it had their 'goto' system, AutoStar. It was very cool - when it worked. Yeah, you just tell it you want to see 'X' and the scope would slew into position. Slick. But setup & calibration was very touchy. You had to have everything dialed in just perfectly for it to work. I later purchased a Meade ETX-125PE scope, by far the most expensive I've ever owned at over $1k. I used it for a couple of weeks but got so frustrated with the electronics that I returned it. Great optics, but it would take me 20-30 minutes to get the system calibrated, and it would slowly 'loose it's mind' over the course of an evening's vieweing. Made the experience of stargazing frustrating, which is exactly the opposite of what it should be.
Not saying to stay away from them, just know what you're getting into. I know some of the newer goto scopes have GPS built into them and that would probably help a lot as that system ought to be able to calibrate itself more accurately.
