Totally agree with your opinion.David 寫:I started with star-hopping with binoculars, then with dobs. I have always been comfortable with such method, and so have never felt the need of using setting circles.
What method we like is, in my humble opinion, usually biased by our experience and our personalities. I guess there is no need to argue whether star-hopping or setting circles are better for beginners or not. It seems as pointless as arguing whether visual astronomy is better or worse than astrophotography, or arguing whether small scopes are better or worse than big scopes.
I started astronomy with equatorial mount, with those celestial co-ordinates concept imprinted, thus find it more easy on star hopping with an equatorial mount.
In my experience, setting circle is not too useful, since the scale of the setting circles in most equatorial mounts are not fine enough (particularly the LN or Mega mount I used). Nowadays with the encoders, the setting circles nearly become a redundant.
The baseline is, if the person can memorize the objects' celestial location, there is no big difference in operating an equatorial or a Dobsonian.