usingen1

On 28.3.2016 at 11:26, DaveGibbons said:

Hi all,

This is a brief review of my recently aquired Altair Astro Starwave F5.9 Achromatic refractor. It's the latest version with longer retractable dewshield and massiive 3" rotatable focusser in a rather fetching red.  It is mated to a humble eq5  with ADM puck and saddle along with beefier 2" eq6 tripod, no drives just a couple of slow motion flexi contols.

I purchased this after trying to find a complete lightish weight set up via usual channels but after a purchase went awry on astro buysell decided to go with a new richfield refractor . Reviews on this scope in all variants have generally been positive in it's various vendor incarnations an I have always loved achromats -false colour never bothers me and could this one be as good as they say? read on!

I decided early on that I did  not need or want a goto mount and  wanted as light as possible sturdy set up  so went with a beefed up eq5 with manual slow mo cables. As it's primary use is as a rich field scope giving over 2.4 degrees fov  it's very liberating to be electronics free.

All bits came last week . The OTA itself is stunning just about the best constructed refractor I have ever owned and Ihave had dozens over the years. OTA weighs in at  around 11kg  add to that a finderscope and 2" diagonal  plus eyepiece all in weight around 13kg  hence thhe need to beef up mount with ADM saddle and 2" tripod .images attached below.

So established it looks fantastiic, but so it should for the price a hefty £830  without diagonal or  finderscope !

O.K.  Lets cut to the chase and see how it performs under the night sky.  I have now had 2 nights out a total of 4 hours viewing and here are my thoughts.

Firstly it does require at least a 30 min cooldown to get the big lump of glass to thermal equilibrium and get the best images, it is however good to go on widefield low power within 10 min and gives outstanding views, on objects such as galactic clusters orion neb or any rich starfield it gives the finest views I have ever seen . On faint objects such as the crab and m51 m81 and 82 the contrast makes them easily stand out with far more pleasing views than many a larger reflector I have owned. M51 in particular was mesmerizing and I swear you could pick out hints of spiral structure with averted vision. You can just get lost in the depth of field and sheer beauty of the views. Having never owned such a fast refractor before all I can say is it opens up a different viewing experience ..so sharp  yet without the abberations of similar focal length newts.

What about the dreaded Chromatic abberation? Well having owned 3 synta 6" f8 it is absolutely better colour corrected and how this is done at f5.9 I do not know.  It is not perfect and has false colour on jupiter and bright stars but will still give very good views up to x150. At this point I did find my minus violet filter worth using on the moon and jupiter but let's be honest  you would be better off with an f10 and upwards if that is what you want to do with visual astronomy. Unfortunately I did not have opportunity to test out on tight doubles as on both nights the seeing was below par although did have a brief glimpse of Propus at x250 and a good split for a few seconds again If double stars your bag a  good  f10 scope will outperform the Starwave in that department -not by much though !

Intra and extra focal start test show smooth optics with ever so slightly softer intafocal  image -still superb though.

The eq5 and slow mo perform brilliantly by the way and the whole set up very smooth and solid. All in alll a compact if expensive gem

 

I love it!

 

regards

 

Dave

 

 

 

I just bought one in white also with the 3" focuser, what do you suggest to complete the scope as far as optics are concerned, mount is not a factor, hace a CGEM DX which i just hypertuned and now is great, and for lighter times an AVX it should do it for visual...Do i need a flattener or a reducer combo, i will be using a eos 6D and 60 Da for AP.  Ernest