Stacked two telescopes on the same mount for a week, one blew the other away

I spent last month comparing my old 90mm refractor against a borrowed 8 inch Dobsonian, both pointed at the Orion Nebula. The refractor gave me this tight, crisp view of the core, but the Dob just swallowed the whole thing with faint wisps and color I never saw before. I thought aperture was everything, but the refractor actually handled the moon better, no chromatic fringing on the terminator. Ended up keeping both since they serve different purposes, which hurts my wallet but makes sense. For deep sky stuff though, I'm never going back to small glass after that week. Has anyone else run a side by side and found the opposite, where a smaller scope won for planets or double stars?

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brian_rivera5918d ago

Gotta disagree on the aperture being king for everything. I ran a similar test last summer, put my 4 inch apo next to a buddy's 12 inch dob on Saturn and double stars. The dob showed more moons and some surface detail, sure, but the little frac just nailed that clean, sharp image of the ring gap and the cassini division like it was drawn with a pencil. On Albireo the dob's star images looked like fuzzy blobs compared to the crisp blue and gold points I got from the smaller scope. Different tools for different jobs, that's what I pulled from it.