Solar Max 60 Report
I have had this new scope for a week now and have it out on several occasions, so time to give a bit of a report.
The specs of this scope are
Aperture 60mm
Focal Length 400mm
f/Ratio 6.6
Bandwidth 0.7A single stacked
I haven't weighed the scope so not sure about the weight but for a fairly small unit it is reasonably heavy. It has an adjustable clamshell which can move up and down the tube to allow balancing. There are three 1/4 inch threads og the base for attaching to mounts. The focuser has 2 parts. A simple sliding drawtube which is held in place by a couple of nylon screws for rough focusing and a solid helical focuser for fine tuning. This arrangement works well but if you have a heavy eyepiece in loosning the nylon screws may cause it to swing around. Eyepieces are held in place with another nylon screw not a compression ring so if it does swing around make sure it is tight!
The scope comes with a 25mm Cemax EP which apppears to be a simple Plossl. I found that there was a lot of ghosting of the image. I only use it now when setting up to amke sure the image is nicely centred before switching to a higher power Nag. In the 13mm Nag at 30x the view is really nice and steady even when seeing is a bit unsteady. This enable you to pick out any interesting features to examine further. I also used a 7mm Nag at 57x which is enough power to get good views of spots and prominences and see some real detail. I tried a 2x barlow which the 7mm also but without much luck.
Tuning is done with a lever on one side. Moving it to about 80% to the left allows a great view of prominences and about the same distance right makes spots and their surround stand out so well done Meade on producing a well tuned scope!
The Sol Ranger finder is easy to use. I setup initially by looking at the shodow of the scope on the ground to roughly line it up. On the back of the Sol Ranger a small white dot appears, centre this and the sun is in the centre of the FOV in the 25mm ep.
I have mounted this on a photo tripod which works OK and on my old EQ2 mount. The EQ I have done a rough Polar alignement with a compass only but if I am careful this is good enough to keep the sun in the FOV at 57x for over an hour with the motor running on the RA axis. The mount has no trouble handling the weight.
Overall I am very impressed. Good points are solid build, easy tuning, easy focusing, well thought out finder. Points that could be better are lack of compression ring on the eyepiece holder, supplied EP is just adequate, nylon screws are a bit dodgy. Have said that, there is nothing that would persuade me that this scope is not great value for money at $1900. Mind you if I was shelling out nearly $10k for a top of the line Solar Max, I would want these items addressed!
Malcolm
