>>4303739CMOS cameras are getting fairly cheap, you can get a good back-iluminated, cooled sensor within 1000$ budget. They are mostly small sensors as APS-C sized and bigger tend to cost double or triple that however big sensors in astrophoto tend to inflate every little problem with your optic and you end up cropping a good chunk of the image anyway if it's not perfectly flat and corrected.
Anyway you can get a good mount if you up your budget by a couple 100s.
>ioptron CEM26>skywatcher HEQ5>celestron AVXall very good mounts, you can't go wrong and they will perform good enough even unguided as long as you don't go over 1/2 of their load limit.
OR you can go even cheaper but be ware you'll be adding up to it's load limit very quickly and unless you get an autoguiding setup images over 60s will get star trails
>skywatcher star adventurer gti>it's the best in it's price range>haven't found anything that can come close>i use itIf you have to make a choice between better optics and better mount, choose the mount first. Good scopes are fairly cheap, a 1000$ small refractor is already more than premium, however 1000$ on a mount only gets you the lower end and severely limits the gear you can mount on it. IMHO if you have the budget get a 2k$ mount first, ioptron makes some new harmonic drive mounts with fairly high load limits while remaining compact and light, or you can just get a tried and true EQ6 that's built like a tank.
I skimped on the mount and i'm kinda regretting it.
Search around for used gear, astro gear gets used very little and treated very well by it's owners so you can get good deals on almost new stuff most of the times.
