Highburymark

Thanks - It is more blue - really nice option for Tak scopes

Really worth a look - spectacular prom looks like a vast bird of prey

Zero colour in or out of focus visually. Takes very high powers without breaking sweat. Perfectly figured optics so SA not a concern. Front heavy like most triplets, but acclimatises well. Pretty light for a near 5” triplet so easy to mount. Just a brilliant all rounder. Here’s mine in white light mode

A few more comments about this excellent little scope. I originally bought it as a hand-held scope for quick night vision sessions, but I’ve also used it extensively as a daytime spotter and an indoors optics tester - as it doesn’t require long distances with artificial stars and other indoor targets. It’s fun to study the fine print on a passport or credit card with different eyepieces. A £300, F/6 refractor shouldn’t be this good, even with FPL53 glass. Field curvature is of course an issue, so some eyepieces aren’t sharp to the field stop. But that’s only to be expected with such a fast scope. In every other aspect, the little Tecnosky is quite excellent. CA is difficult to coax out of these optics - only with a 2.5mm eyepiece can I see any violet fringing on leaves/branches against a bright sky. The ronchi test is textbook. An artificial star shows the lenses are very well figured. Very little colour out of focus. The diffraction rings are quite significantly clearer on one side than the other - which might suggest spherical aberration - but in use the sharpness at silly powers shows that any SA is minimal. The other day I tried a Takahashi TOE 2.5mm and a 2x barlow, producing well over 100x per inch, and was amazed how well the image held together. These diminutive scopes are available under many brands - not all as cheap as Tecnosky. I can imagine they’d make an excellent first apo for imagers - but don’t underestimate their appeal as a very capable visual scope.

Didn’t realise Skywatcher had such a price difference between UK and the States. The Evolux 82 is $915 over the pond.

It’s not unusual to find bits of dust between lenses, as well as inside the tube. I noticed on a previous Takahashi FC 100 that when I was cleaning the outer lens with an air blaster, a little bit of dust between the lenses moved - so the air gap between the doublet lenses wasn’t sealed anyway. Even if you pay a lot of money doing what Peter describes above, you will probably find new dust within a year or so. Definitely best ignored and just enjoy your wonderful telescope.

Filaments with a Quark or Solar Scout might resemble a double stack system if you get a great filter with a narrow bandwidth (luck of the draw), or if you are able to push the focal ratio of the system to F/40+. But true double stack filters suppress photospheric light bleeding through into the Chromosphere - such as on the limb , where they will show individual spicules, not the ‘double limb’ effect you get with a Quark or other mica filters. Daystar was definitely pushing it with the ‘double stack’ claim.

Squared paper is good for testing these type of distortions - here’s a Panoptic 24 (pincushion) against a Leica orthoscopic microscope eyepiece.

Is that confirmed now Jeremy - about TOE production ending? I struggle to follow the latest news on this. Tak’s comms department doesn’t seem to adhere to the same standards of excellence as the rest of the company….

Still too fast really at F/5.8. Should aim for F/7, or as close to it as possible, or even better above, to get best from the Quark. Also a well figured achromat is fine for hydrogen alpha.

There’s already a 4.3x telecentric in the device. But I agree it would have made more sense to use a more powerful telecentric - as long as overall magnification was kept to practical levels. I guess they didn’t do this because it would required a redesign of the Quark element and hiked the cost - it had to based around a Quark, presumably with etalons that didn’t make it to Quark grade - that original £695 price was very low for an Ha device after all.

I will hold my tongue for now Ags as I’m meant to be doing a review for Astronomy Now, and I haven’t had chance to thoroughly test it. Had a couple of problems with the first unit so it’s gone back to Baader.

it remains a mystery why Daystar didn’t issue the Solar Scout with a slower OTA - obviously they wanted to market it as a 60mm aperture, but why F/15, when the Quark is designed to operate best at F/30+? Ags is right to experiment with stopping down the aperture, and is getting some great results at different focal ratios. I’ve just been trying out a Baader Sundancer - similar to the Quark - and the difference in contrast on surface features between F/21 and F/30 is enormous. I suspect there are more than a few Solar Scout buyers out there who are disappointed with the visual performance at F/15, but who would see a lot more at F/25-F/30, even if aperture, and therefore resolution is lower.

Excellent news Dave. Hope you get the connection sorted.

Have to say I agree. It might produce satisfactory views but it won’t get the best out of your Quark. The unique thing about these ‘eyepiece’ Ha filters is you can use them with almost any refractor - the slower and bigger the better, as long as magnification and aperture isn’t too high for your seeing.

Ideally it should be an F/7 scope or slower if you want to achieve best surface detail without stopping down the aperture. In general, below F/30 you have light from the photosphere partly obscuring chromosphere detail. Proms will be nice and bright even at faster focal ratios, but filaments will be fainter. Of course each etalon is different, so you never know quite what you’re going to get until you test it.

Incredible Piero - as a refractor man most of the above is beyond me, but it looks like you did a beautiful job

Best looking refractor ever made by Skywatcher in my opinion. The 80mm Equinox was certainly not colour free - but then how many F/6.25 ED doublets are? However, it was a great all-round scope, and whatever CA was present never really bothered me. Performed very well on planets. Although that was FPL53, I suspect the Evolux will be pretty similar. A little bit of false colour should be expected - it’s only if it diminishes views that it becomes an issue.

I bet the etalon is fine - so frustrating when the mechanics let you down. Wonder if Daystar offer a buy-back service like Lunt?

The February event was clearly a Coronal Mass Ejection - but when does a large prom become a CME, I wonder?

The typical large prominence is around 100,000 km - ie the sort of prom we see often at times of significant activity like now. Every now and then there are much bigger proms - I remember one that was around 300,000km. In February this year, the Solar Orbiter captured a giant prom on the far side which stretched 3 million km into space - equivalent of 250 Earths.

It’s worth waiting for in my view. I actually prefer my Maxbright to the MkV I had. Perhaps that’s down to collimation differences, but the Maxbright is much lighter too. Hope stocks arrive before too long.

I guess most mainstream eyepiece coatings have improved substantially. But the Celestron Ultimas 30mm - for example - which I’ve just sold back to Steve (Saganite), have superb coatings. They’re right on a par with new TV Plossls. And these must be 40 years old, maybe more……

Amazing collection Louis. Some people collect stamps, others vintage Ferraris. Never to be posted or driven in earnest again. With optics, you can use them over and over, night and day, in the knowledge that they’ll retain or increase their value. And no doubt there are some vintage classics of the future among those in your picture - perhaps a theme for another thread.

Very nice and solid set up. It takes a while to work out best solutions for solar binoviewing, but looks like you’ve got all bases covered.