TS-Optics PhotoLine 130mm triplet is back. I used to have this telescope a few years ago and made quite a lot of pictures and observations using it. Then I sold it and regretted it. That is why some time ago I decided to purchase it back 🙂 A significant discount on this very model helped me to make a decision.
Technically speaking PhotoLine 130/910 is an air-spaced tripled with one element made of FPL-53 glass. This model has been available in the market for quite a long time – relatively inexpensive when compared to other triplets with similar aperture, but the quality is good.
But what I like the most about this telescope is its versatility despite the large aperture and the significant weight. The telescope can still be assembled into the mount by one person. EQ6 class mount is perfectly capable of operating this telescope both for visual and also for long exposure imaging. A decent aperture makes it a good companion for visual observations – double stars and clusters look magnificent and dark sky will reveal many nebulae and galaxies. Also, the Moon and planets will show much contrasty detail without any chromatic aberration. For imaging, full-frame flatteners with or without reduction are available, so a lot of deep-sky targets are in reach for the imaging setup based on the TS PhotoLine 130 f/7 triplet.
The image above is NGC6888 Crescent Nebula. Total exposure time was one hour (20×3 minutes subframes) under the suburban sky with QHY268M camera and Baader Ha filter. Despite the modest exposure time the nebula and background hydrogen clouds are well-defined, and also well-known Soap Bubble Nebula was recorded. It is better visible in the lower left corner of the inverted image below.
Another one-hour exposure photo captured with PhotoLine 130 was the M27 Dumbbell planetary nebula in the Little Fox constellation. This is quite bright and quite big planetary nebula, but you can see how actually small the nebula is when presented in the field of view of the APS-C format camera sensor. But – on the other hand – how much detail was recorded and is visible in the enlarged crop of the image center part. M27 image was done using Baader RGB filters, 20 subframes 1 minute each for every color.
The level of recorded detail is quite high. Popular CMOS cameras attached to this telescope via 0.8x reducer will give the pixel scale around 0.8-1.0 “/px. At this scale, the actual image resolution will be quite often limited not by the imaging setup properties, but by the atmospheric conditions (unless you are happy to observe at the premium location where seeing is often closer to 1″ than 2”).
Yet another one-hour exposure made with a hydrogen alpha filter is presented below. This is a central part of Gamma Cygni nebula near the Sadr star. A lot of contrasty detail can be observed here – dark patches of dust in the front of glowing hydrogen clouds make these sky areas one of the most interesting parts of the Milky Way visible in the northern hemisphere.
The next image is the IC5086 emission nebula located near the famous North America and Pelican nebulae in the Cygnus constellation. This nebula is sometimes called The Forsaken Nebula due to the fact that its neighbors are much more recognizable targets. This nebula is also not so bright, so I spent seven hours on this target, but this time I recorded data with three narrowband filters and created a single color image of IC5068 nebula. It is three hours of data from hydrogen alpha filter and two hours of data from each of the oxygen and sulfur filters.
Last but not least – here is the preview of my summer/autumn imaging project. I decided to capture narrowband data for the larger area in the Cygnus constellation around the NGC7000 North America nebula. The plan is to capture eight panels to create a large field-of-view mosaic. The amount of data required for each mosaic is 6-8 hours, so the total time spent on data capture for this project will be about 50-60 hours. But at the beginning, I decided to record 15 minutes of data for each panel and stitch them together to see if the selected area was interesting enough. And that is the result of this preview image.
In this large context, it is easy to recognize, that North America, Pelican, and IC5068 nebulae are actually the same glowing hydrogen cloud only separated by dark patches of dust. I am very excited to capture more data for this project and reveal more details in this area of the space 🙂
I also attached a few images of the Sun made with TS Optics PhotoLine 130/910 triplet and DayStar Quark filter. This only confirms the fact how versatile this telescope is.
Clear skies!
