GrAgrK

Thanks Elp! I might have some updates to share soon. So far, I have to agree with what has been said above. After further consideration, my view at this point is that this product is not being taken seriously by its manufacturer. Though, for the marketing part they score 5*. On the bright side the seller, to his defense, seems willing to resolve the situation. Either within specification or not, if real world performance is "meh" one cannot light heartedly accept whatever he/she gets. In the meantime, a picture converter from RAW unprocessed.

Many thanks Carbon Brush and Peter Drew (same goes for Elp who I thanked already), your feedback and insight is valuable to me! I need to share some updates from today's noon that muddy the waters a lot. Today we got clear skies and I manage to test my sample for about 2 hours. The test was held indoors due to the prohibitively low temperatures through a double glass door (of the float glass kind) and the sun at 5-8 degrees elevation. The setup was 80mm f6, 1.25'' UV/IR cut filter positioned about 70mm ahead of the Quark and 40mm NPL, 25mm Celestron Plossl and 18mm BCO. I went through, initially, the following temperature tuner settings CCW 5, CCW 3, 0, CW 3 (didn't try CW 5 since it was already worse at CW 3). In short, roughly half of the FOV is on band from CCW 5 until CW1, the other half from CCW 4 until CW3, room temperature about 23 Deg. From CCW 3 to CCW 1 the contrast was pretty even visually. Now I should make a short stop and provide some background, I have only viewed through a PST before (not mine), which was BAD (!), like much worse than plain white light. As such, I do not have hands on experience regarding what is (well except from my BAD PST one) good, decent or great. My reasoning is very much aligned with Elp about H-Alpha equipment. For my case (cost, space, availability e.t.c.) it was (and is) Quark or nothing, so either a usable Quark or nothing. Parenthesis closed. I saw a lot of sun features, practically everything that can be seen in the following image from: gong2.nso.edu/HA (hopefully I am not breaking any rules here): The CME at the upper left corner, even appeared (I believe) blue shifted since contrast was better with a couple CCW (colder?) tuner positions. I estimated that most contrasty and even FOV is at 2-3 CCW tuner positions. When looking at the Etalon without an eyepiece, there are some slightly brighter/darker spots... which cause some brightness variation throughout the eyepiece's FOV, but only apparent in a picture, like the attached one (let me apologize in advance for the horrible picture quality, handheld mobile phone camera and no processing, but should be sufficient for representing what I mentioned above), visually nothing sticking. To sum it up: if I was a seller I would have many points for promoting this sample. As a buyer without a good past experience as a reference, I am having a hard time faulting my sample based on what I saw today and also considering that I will be using it only for visual. Therefore, I am leaning towards keeping this Quark as is, because it does seem within what Daystar promises to deliver and the view is certainly pleasing (also considering that if already good enough, an exchange might return a worse sample). I would love to hear your thoughts over this (positive) update.

Many thanks for your reply Elp! A lot of quality issues have been reported in the past for this device, so I did not expect perfection. However, I cannot accept that any quality is "good enough", there must a reasonable baseline. The seller seemed willing to sort out the situation when I expressed my concerns following my first impression. I am leaning towards returning it, so your opinion helps me a lot!

So after a lot of back and forth, I purchased a new Quark Chromosphere and the initial impression left me wondering if it is one of the "bad ones". So out of the box the most obvious feature was some creasing over one of the filters, visible as distorted reflection when a bright light is being shinned from the eyepiece end. It affects about 1/3 of the total area (and it looks like a pie graph sector) while the remaining 2/3 have nothing out of the ordinary. In the telescope, 80mm F6, the same area has a few small "bubbles" when looked at without an eyepiece in place (telescope pointed towards the sun of course). These "features" do not seem to affect the view in some dramatic way BUT the field of view appears to be split in half, roughly, with the affected half having obviously less contrast. That being said, a couple of counterclockwise clicks of the adjustment knob seems to improve things a bit, yet still the unaffected area performs better. For this test I moved across the FOV a plague and observed how visible or contrasty it remained. With the knob set at 0, essentially the plague was invisible over almost half of the FOV. Unfortunately, I am located too far north and the sun barely makes it above the horizon at best, so a more rigorous test is rather difficult if not impossible. I would really appreciate if some of you Quark owners could give me some feedback based on how your samples look/perform. Thanks in advance! P.S. I am purely visual observer, and for this test I used 25mm and 40mm plossls.