Thinking Of Getting...

[MiguelMJr]

Thinking of getting a 6" f4 imaging newt. Only $300 and I can pay $75/month and have it in 4 months.

It looks sweet and the FOV is nice and small, well at least smaller than my current scope.

What do you think? Is this a good scope?

Miguel

[laser_jock99]

Not many people seem to own this scope (I can't think of another owner on this forum). With an F4 Newtonian you'll need to collimate carefully and invest in good collimation tools. A quality coma corrector is a must too- so allow for these items in your overall costing.

Once collimated they are capable of nice, widefield images, but being a steel tube Newtonian you may need to re-check collimation and focus if there is major temperature variation during the imaging session. I did add stronger primary mirror springs to mine to aid holding collimation.

A selection of images I took with this scope may be seen in this gallery. I use a focal reducer with this scope to bring the F ratio down to F2.9 so some of the exposures listed may seem rather short for the amount of data captured.

[MiguelMJr]

Hey laser_jock99,

Thanks for the reply and the link to your very nice images. At the Astro-Tech site they explain about the coma corrector but I didn't realize that collimation would need to be very exact.

I'm still in the process of getting my first real imaging kit together (still need most of the big things) so I'm now thinking to hold off a little and keep looking around, maybe a larger dob would suit me better as then I would have an imaging and an observing kit.

Miguel