If all you are trying to find are solar system objects -- the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, plus the fainter ones, it doesn't matter whether you have bright, polluted skies. You get so much light from these bodies that it cuts right through the pollution.

Don't knock star-hopping. I've been doing it for over fifty years. About 15 years or so ago I went to the Telrad system on my 10"f4 Newtonian. I've never used a GOTO but there will be one on the new GEM I'm getting along with a 7"f7 fluorite Petzval APO refractor.

Few might know what a Petzval is or how it's used in a refractor (lens telescope). Replacing a more expensive third-element in a triplet objective (an objective is either a lens or mirror), the Petzval is a doublet sited close to the focuser. It has the effect of making the chromatic aberration less *and* flattening the field. Also, I feel better about having the softer (that is, softer than glass) fluorite element inside the telescope's OTA (Optical Tube Assembly) instead of being the first element in a lens and thus open to the air and any blown grit in that air.

And somebody on this forum tsked tsked about you having *only* a 10-inch telescope? Wow! You can spend your entire life looking at objects you can see with a 6-inch telescope. Add another lifetime to use the 10" to its full capabilities. I wonder what size that person uses. There are diminishing returns with the use of larger telescopes unless what you are doing with it is taking hundreds or thousands of fast exposures a night and stiching them together with Registrax or similar software.

But for visual work you have to take in account the seeing conditions to a greater extent than in the above example. Once you get into the 4-inch or larger 'scopes, atmospheric waves come into play. That's why the superfine Questar is 3.5 inches in diameter. BTW, when you go out to see if the sky is cloudy, also look to see if the stars are twinkling. That's the time to read a book or watch a DVD! Magnifying a twinkling star is a waste of time. It won't stay still in your ocular (eyepiece); it will jump and bounce around. A friend of mine in Chicago caught himself looking up when he went into a closet! It wasn't clear so he didn't set up his 4" Unitron refractor. . . .

There are many nights over a year when you can set up and comfortably use a 4" telescope (at low power) that you can barely see anything with a 10" or larger telescope, due to seeing.

May your skies be clear and your streetlights terminal,
Donald