Gilly,

You won’t be able to see much with a typical 70mm refractor. It also depends a whole lot on where you live. I am in light polluted Southern California so that even the relatively bright Orion Nebula doesn’t look like much. Although light polluted, we do have pretty steady skies for the planets. (Close by Mt. Wilson observatory is a big clue.) Sometimes when the air is steady and the LA basin is covered with a marine layer, the planets are spectacular. Saturn and Jupiter seasons are the best. I can routinely see the A,B, and C rings of Saturn and the shadow of the ball on the rings. On Jupiter you can see the Great Red Spot (actually just a pale salmon color), lots of swirls of cloud activity, and transits of the moons and shadows of the moons across the face. This coupled with the fact that most of my observing sessions are relatively brief and from my deck or backyard makes a refractor the best for me. Plus I just like refractors! If you are in an area of rapidly dropping night time temperatures, and you have only brief sessions, any decent sized mirror in your reflector will take hours to thermally stabilize and may not ever stabilize enough for good views. I only occassionally go out to star parties. There I’ll train my scope on the planets, or use widefield eyepieces for cruising the Milky Way star clouds and then just use somebody else’s big reflector for the faint stuff. So if your area is too light polluted and your observing sessions are brief and you don’t like to set up and fuss with equipment, a nice refractor would be best. A nice used 4” (102mm) Takahashi FS102 refractor can be had for (what I think is a bargain price) about $1500. New 4” refractors (Televue, TMB, Astro-Physics) run $3500+. A nice equatorial mount and eyepieces would add a couple of thousand more. Definitely shop used equipment from the one and only astromart.com. You can get all sorts of stuff here with the retail wrung out of the prices. The Takahashi refractor is among one of the best, and it is bargain priced only because it is an older model and they are relatively plentiful. Good optics hold their value. If you were able to buy a nice Tak for $1500 and you took good care of it, you could probably use it for a year and still sell it for $1500. Buy some nice used Televue eyepieces, use them for awhile and do the same. Most used astronomy equipment is just barely used. My refractor has actually gone up in value mostly because if I were to put an order in for one today, I’d probably get it in about 4 years.

Clear skies,

glenmore
1991 300CE

155mm/f7 Astro-Physics refractor