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Old 07-12-2014, 03:55 PM
Wavytone
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Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: Killara, Sydney
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Key distinction with refractors: Unless it states the objective is an "ED" I would steer clear as it means its an ordinary achromatic doublet and these are only good at f/15, not f/5.

The short-focus achromatic refractors like the Bintel one you linked are only suitable as "finderscopes" to be used as low-power. This will be OK at low magnification say 10-20X, but as soon as you crank up the magnification to ~ 50X you will start to notice coloured edges around bright things like the moon. To solve this, the old-fashioned achromatic refractors were very long things (typically f/15) which makes for a long and unwieldy tube (which would be 1.5 metres long in your case). Space here is too limited to go into why this works, optically.

The key discriminator with this will be the views of the moon and the bright planets (Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars) where it will fare rather poorly if lined up side by side with the next scope...

The optimum travel-scope for visual use IMHO is an f/7 ED Apochromatic objective, this will give you the low-power wide-field views, and at the same time the ED glass is capable of giving excellent diffraction limited images at high power, 100 - 120X is realistic. This type of scope can easily handle magnifications spanning 17X (42mm eyepiece) to 120X (6mm eyepiece). Orion, Stellarvue and many others made excellent ED f/7 apo refractors around the 102mm aperture (it's a fair guess all used the same lenses made in China).

Example http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...d.php?t=100763

The ultimate are the triplets and fluorite types, more for those into photography. A beginner won't spot the improvement over ED apochromatic doublets, but a photographer will.

Last edited by Wavytone; 07-12-2014 at 04:10 PM.
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