Quote:
Originally Posted by multiweb
Nice one Kevin. Really cool colors.  |
Thanks Marc!
Quote:
Originally Posted by doppler
Excellent pic Kevin, you have captured a lot of fine detail there and those defraction spikes really make the image sparkle.
Rick
|
Thanks Rick!
Quote:
Originally Posted by rustigsmed
nice one kevin, some good dust, how are you finding the newt?
rusty
|
Well.... it's taking a bit of getting used to. There's the good and the bad.
For the good, as you can see it does seem to be fast compared to my ED100 refractor. This pic at astrobin needed 4 hours in cool weather.
http://astrob.in/118167/0/ though it is deeper. It's possible to go fairly deep with short subs therefore doesn't really need guiding for a quick flirt.
The tube is short, compact and not too heavy.
The bad. Collimating it at F4 is tricky. Very tricky. I was mucking about with it for 2 hours last night and I don't think I'll ever get it perfect. The main mirror cell design is screwy.
I would do it differently if I was building one. The springs are too light duty and the tightening bolts move the mirror cell. With my homebuilds I simply use 3 very heavy duty bolts and springs which work better than this.
The central obstruction is large and loses light. The F ratio might be 4 but the T stop is more like around 4.8. It's probably equal to a good 5 or 6 inch refractor.
Tube currents are worse than refractors.
But it's a lot cheaper than an equivalent refractor and that's why I got it.