On Monday, 2 January 2017 15:01:45 UTC+1, Quadibloc wrote:
On Monday, January 2, 2017 at 1:34:12 AM UTC-7, Chris.B wrote:

If only altazimuth mountings with drives and Goto became the norm. The small
refractor market could be transformed if only they would junk the CRAPPY
equatorials.

But if you want to take a long-exposure photograph, you need an equatorial.

John Savard

Those who wish to engage in imaging will need a far better equatorial than that supplied with my [optically useful] Bresser Skylux.
It has no drive motor for a start and manual steering would excite every node of its highly flexible, stumpy tripod and ridiculous mounting.
The multi-task effort that went into casting, plating and machining the Bresser mounting could have provided a far better altazimuth and even a far more useful tripod.

How difficult can it be to make an offset fork with GPS for location and orientation?
Now apply sensors to read the altitude and azimuth positions.
The user selects a target and the pushes the telescope as a sound rises and falls in frequency.
The closer the telescope is pointed to the target object the higher the pitch.

Hey presto and Abracadabra! Push-to is already possible using a mobile phone with App attached to the telescope.
Vastly more people already own mobile telephones than own small refractors on crappy equatorial mountings.
So, in practice, the telescope owner needs only a stable mounting which actually holds the telescope STEADY enough to see everything the telescope optics can usefully offer.

I submit that the badly required stability could be most easily be provided by a plywood, offset fork mounting on a sturdy, well designed wooden tripod with well triangulated legs.
BUT! It seems that the entire might of the Chinese, American, Asian, African, Australian and European manufacturing base is completely incapable of providing such a mounting and tripod. i.e. Nil. Nul points! Error 404. Does not compute!

It being only a pipe dream in the fantasy realms of highly advanced, alien technology worthy only of YouTube.
As such it will probably take the human race another century before a USEFULLY STABLE telescope mounting and tripod, for a small refractor, is available under a several thousand dollar ceiling. Perhaps never!?!

70mm with a suitably gentle focal ratio makes a far better telescope than smaller or shorter one.
70mm also better matches [Patrick] Moore's Law. ;-)