This is my first post here so bear with me on any amateur mistakes I make.
I'm a poly student with only a year of experience playing around with my school's equatorial mounted telescope, sometimes a Skywatcher HEQ5 Pro GoTo Mount (I think that's the name). Found the GoTo mount pretty hard since we had to align to polaris everytime we wanted to stargaze, and considering our weekly friday session had almost half of the view blocked by a building, it's pretty obvious to say that we would not be able to see a whole lot of stars for the optimal 3-star alignment. Hence, only being able to bring manual mounts to see anything.
Right now, I'm thinking of getting a small GoTo altaz mount and telescope for myself for astrophotography (I have a nikon D5500) since equatorial mounts don't really work well for my location and that I don't have a feasible way of transporting equipment without spending a lot of $$.
Need suggestions
Conditions:
-Relatively lightweight & ease of transport
-Preferably alt-az GoTo mount
-A reasonable price for an 18y/o student just starting out astronomy
-Able to take pictures of DSOs (at least with a 30sec exposure without trailing, I'd be happy)
Thinking of
1) SKY-WATCHER SKYMAX-102
2) Celestron Nexstar 127SLT
3) Investing in the future in an autoguider so that I can take longer exposure shots if everything works out.
What do you guys think? Any advice is greatly appreciated
