Astronomers love equipment!  Telescopes, mounts, ccd cameras, filters, eyepieces and so on preoccupies alot of our time.  Do you peruse Astromart daily?  We live in great times as far as equipment goes, there is virtually no limit to the whiz bang you can get as long as your budget is large.  I've got a long way to go before I would consider my setup high end, but I've avoided for the most part the incremental upgrade route as I figure that just drains more money out of your pocket along the way.  I try to research stuff before I buy and decide if this is the piece of equipment that will last me years.  Of course, I make mistakes along the way and turn stuff over but I have alot that I've had for a few years and it serves me well.
My equipment now consists of:

Meade 10" LX200 Schmidt Cassagrain telescope and fork mount














I have a Vixen 80mm edsf refractor which sits atop the SCT in ADM rings on a rail. The scopes are aimed precisely at the same point and I can use either for visual observations or what I do mostly astrophotography.  Normally I use the LX200 as a guidescope with a Meade DSI and my Canon 350D DSLR on the refractor.  This gives me a large chip and wide field of view.  I hope to get a QHY8 camera soon due to the limitations of a dslr.  A dedicated CCD camera has better cooling and is suited for astrophotography straight out of the box where my dslr really needs a modification to capture the red nebulosity in most astronomical objects.
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