Chris

I noticed this as well John, but wondered if it had already been pointed out? There's literally one thing I wish the 8" versions had, it's only a small aesthetic thing, but the 6" models look so cool with the anodised red dovetail bar!

Hi Steve, I was going to buy your 0.75 reducer in the near future to do the same comparison you suggest, so YES PLEASE! I'll PM you

Thanks Rob, I knew you could buy a tilt plate for RC's so thought that was to rectify the lack of one from the factory, so that's good to hear you have it built in Yes amazing prices at FLO and and I love the black stealthy livery. I only ordered mine like Thursday night and I have a DHL message saying it will be delivered today! Very exciting

They are quite openly GSO scopes as stated by FLO, and I doubt there will be any real difference to GSO or Orion badged scopes. From what I have heard so far ( I'm happy to be corrected if wrong) FLO were keeping an eye on this range by GSO as they saw their potential, but they were waiting for any early scope issues to be ironed out. E.g. having to add a third party tilt plate to correct any malalignment of the optical axis. I believe this is now incorporated where the focuser meets the back of the OTA? I guess the livery and the name Stella Lyra is FLO being happy to put their name to a product, and I've heard many a time they only stock telescopes they believe in.

Hi vlaiv, I'll try and answer this question from my honest experience. Although I understand what you're getting at and the argument for the f/ratio myth, and it indeed does make sense of paper. I can't get away from my experience of trying to use C8's and a C8 Edge natively for imaging DSO objects. I literally couldn't detect DSO's on my subs at f10, but when reduced to f/7 Boom! there they were. I think F8 natively will be ok but I would like the flexibility of being able to reduce the focal length and field of view from an image brightness point of view as well as being able to crop to taste rather than what the FOV depicts. In other words I might be ok with a little bit of curvature in the corners if it frames the object I'm imaging a little better. I guess it's about flexibility in a nut shell, and image brightness.

Thanks Vlaiv, I never realised you could simply multiply the corrected field in millimetres by the reduction factor. Very handy because I knew using a reducer would limit the corrected field, but didn't quantitively know by how much exactly, so thanks for that! I guess I can just crop out the edges reduced with my Fuji and Sony mirrorless and the little sensor of my ZWO ASI385 wouldn't have to worry. I've been eyeing up the 533 for some time but need to look at what arcsec per pixel it's gives at different focal lengths. There's no point over or under sampling by too much. Thanks

Ah if I had known I would have grabbed one the same time as the RC8 but I've just bought Kirkster's CCDT67 reducer. Good that you stock a reducer for the RC's and I wonder if you can reduce the CC's effectively?

Well for what it's worth I found it: https://www.cloudynights.com/articles/cat/user-reviews/telescopes/gso-8-inch-true-cassegrain-r3215

That's good to hear, I'm surprised it keeps pace with your 10" Dob though because the CC8 vs C8 review I'm trying to re find was talking about how the small central obstruction means the primary mirror is effectively slightly undersized at 7.3". I really need to find the review!

I've Just invented telescope review burlesque...it's now a thing 😆

I read a C8 vs CC8 vs 6" Apo head to head write up the other day but can I find it now! lol It's on the web somewhere?

Stella Lyra 8" RC ordered I'm sure it's an easy fix to swap the rails around for my mounts Vixen saddle. Worst case scenario I'll buy an ADM Vixen to Losmandy saddle adaptor. Looking forward to having this as my observatory scope. Literally the same design as most large professional observatories!

These are Brilliant! I'm on this like a fly on something! Very exciting!

@Stu I tried the de ringing tool in registax to try and remove the Blue ring but that didn't work. but had slightly better luck with the Hue-Chroma tool in GIMP: Bonus giant Drizzle over process version

Cool, I'll give it a bash after dinner Stu.

@Stu I thought I would have a go at running you Mars PNG through Registax but unfortunately ran out of dynamic range pretty quick with a PNG. I think it's too compressed. I could try again if you have a Tiff or Raw file?

Cheers! Sadly I don't currently own any long refractors despite a long standing obsession with them 🤩 I'm slowly building up my telescope arsenal again, so I can't imagine it will be long before I get my hands on another long frac. The obsy where the mount will live would be too small for a really long frac, but certainly a 4" f/10 would fit. I can give you an educated guess regarding the mount. I think it would handle long scopes better than say an EQ5 because of the more substantial 2" tripod and really nice bearings on both axis. My guess is that it would sit somewhere between an EQ5 and an HEQ5 in terms of payload. Initially I will be using a WO Megrez 72, but I'm in talks with someone about something more observatory class. The old bank account needs to brace itself

Thanks for the report Paul., I missed all the action as I was working late, but it was cloudy anyway so at least the weather didn't rub it in lol

Brilliant to see you imaging, Stu That's some impressive image scale for starters! Trust me, if you now load the image into Registax 6, and play with the wavelet sliders, you'll be surprised how much more detail you can pull out. Those wavelets seem to posses some kind of Voodoo magic I swear.

Hi Rob, this is very interesting indeed! Really surprised that central obstruction sits in last place for effecting contrast! RC telescopes have roughly a 25% central obstruction and are pretty much considered imaging scopes only. I now wonder how contrasty these scopes are visually? And here's me thinking I can tell the difference between a refractor and a Newtonian contrast wise.

Thanks Rob, yeah it's outwardly quite traditional for sure so would probably look fab with a long refractor onboard. I initially went into the design origins from the 80's Vixen GP mounts, and talked about how it was basically a souped up Bresser EXOS two with possibly better bearings and motors, plus added belt drives and PMC8 module, but there was a lot that made the cutting room floor to keep things concise. I think I got 70 minutes down to 13 minutes lol I'm hopeful that I'll have a better experience than with the Astro FI

There doesn't seem to be great deal of information out there with regards to these mounts plus I couldn't find any users when I asked on SGL a while ago, so when FLO recently started stocking the EXOS2 PMC8 I decided to buy one to both review and install in my observatory. If all goes well this could be a viable alternative to the usual Skywatcher and Celestron mounts we all love so much but are in short supply now days. This is part one in a series of maybe 2 or 3 videos. On paper this mount looks almost too good to be true for the money, but lets do the practical and see

Great that they are extending the range as they did start at £899 upwards which is out of reach for many. I'm guessing it's Stella Mira for refractors and Stella Lyra for reflectors then.

ok, this seems to be the only example of a Stella Lyra telescope in the whole of the Internet-verse!

What's going on? I actually thought FLO had extended their range and renamed the brand!