New instrument onboard – after many years of picturing with newton telescopes I eventually decided to change to lenses. After a few emails with very nice and professional discussion with teleskop-spezialisten.de and few more days for selecting and adjusting the big gun arrived. Of course it is larger than expected, and it seems that 3/4 of its weight is placed in the lens cell. Refractor is well build, focuser is stiff and fits directly to the 2.5″ 0.79x reducer using Zeiss M68 thread. Last night first light was possible, but only for a few minutes. I used Canon 550D attached to the focuser without reducer (still waiting for adapters) and pictured Albireo binary star.
Above it is a 1:1 crop from frame center. Picture scale is 0.97″/px, it means that small stars at the image have apparent diameter, like one cent coin seen from 2km distance.
I am very happy with the results, the stars are pinpoint, there is no visible color fringes, and with only 10 seconds exposures stars as faint as 15mag have been recorded (so about 3000x times fainter than stars visible with naked eye).
More images to come (hopefully) soon 🙂
Clear skies!
