About a month ago I took delivery of a GSO 6" reflector on a SkyView I mount. It's F5, so I expected some coma. However, the amount visible in my photos blew me away. The photos below were all taken on the same night in late January in reasonable seeing.
The tracking isn't right but it's close enough to demonstrate the point.
http://users.on.net/%7Emmienik/photo...20-%20coma.jpg
Nikon D70 , GSO 25mm plossl via camera adapter. 30 seconds ISO 1600.
http://users.on.net/%7Emmienik/photo...ery%20poor.jpg
It's Mars, but no one would know if I didn't tell them
http://users.on.net/%7Emmienik/photo...ery%20poor.jpg
Saturn, or a very rough approximation of it.
The planetary views look ok but extremely small at 25mm or even 15, but as soon as I try to use 9 or 6mm all I can see if a washed out fuzzy blob. I have a 3x ED Barlow but that just makes things worse with all eyepieces.
I can't see the Cassini division and can barely strain to see the rings themselves at all in a low power eyepiece.
I'm having a lot of problems with collimation. If I line up all the mirrors with a Cheshire so they look ok, my laser collimator says everything is way out of line. If I use the laser collimator and it indicates everything is perfect I get the above results.
I'm not expecting miracles from a 150mm, 750mm length reflector, but the above results are indicative of what I can see in the eyepiece. It's very disappointing and it's making me reluctant to pull the telescope out at all and spend an hour setting up polar alignment. I think I'll need to find a local astronomy group and get expert advice from them on collimation.
So far collimating has been a royal pain and I feel I've completely got the wrong 'scope. I should be using a Maksutov
