josefk

Nice read Peter. Thanks. It's not for me yet this EAA (technophobe outside of work hours :-)) but i do find it quite fascinating to read about your experiences and those of others. Cheers

So the whole point of this FSQ is to up my GnG capability over my super light spotter while keeping it as simple and light as possible so I can hump it to a nice locally dark deer park about 300…400m from my house without too much friction or effort. This is for evenings where I may only get an hour or maybe two rather than a more considered two or three where I’d be using bigger kit. My main EP case is just shy of 7kg. Last night I found that’s still a bit too much to carry along with everything else so here’s a grab and go “bug out kit” ready to go sans finder and diagonal which can go in a little camera bag. x19, x56, x90, x113, & x136 covered in a relatively light way. Put another way >3-degrees sweeper, 100-degree AFOV high contrast workhorse and 3x sub 1mm exit pupil peepers. For info - the often recommended (for this scope) peli 1535 is a tight fit in the depth dimension!

Very cool. Super.

Absolutely lovely as always!

i wish i had a driven mount for this very reason but do also prefer a silent non electrical set up so it's manual tracking for me. I find i'm better at looking for long periods (maybe the whole time it takes for the object to drift across the EP) then a quick scribble then another long look ad infinitum. Works well except for Luna where there i can never keep up in any event - neither with the drifting nor with the changing shadows. 🙂 I consider it a good test of short term memory!

So a few weights and dims. These are a little bit hard to fathom from Takahashi published figures because it depends how you have it configured i suppose. i would have appreciated these when kicking the tyres previously... "packable" length set up with the CAA left in place followed by a Baader 2" clicklock but no spacers thereafter: 445mm. "packable" height (tallness) in the symmetrical cradle tak_tka21420g: 155mm (would be 11mm less allowing for the manfrotto plate i have fitted already) "packable" width in the same cradle: 170mm. it would be narrower by maybe 10mm even in the cradle if i had the cradle opening and the micro-focuser knob on the same side. Weight: 3468g OTA only plus one half of a finder quick release 4438g OTA and cradle and manfrotto plate (120g less w/o the plate) 5035g OTA+cradle+plate+tak 7x50 finder

Absolutely better safe than sorry no doubt @ollypenrice. I think it did change at some point in the series and i think the 85mm and the 106mm are now different (whereas they had commonality in the past) - i believe the current 106 still exposes the rear elements quite "openly" (you will know better than me re. the current 106 of course).

Especially in the UK @mikeDnight I haven’t been out for more than a 45 minute session since the end of May and that is UK skies putting the brakes on not lack of trying on my part! Having an easy option to get out does at least mean those short windows get used.

It would be easy to have more aperture for less money too. I’ve been here before and everything gets bigger by tiny salami sliced decisions and I was very keen to avoid that . For me it had to be a flat FOV finally so that effectively made it a choice of three scopes, the FSQ106 is way too much money for GnG (and I didn’t fancy used on this type of scope). It’s been the NP101 that has alway turned my head (4” sweet spot blah blah blah) but it’s longer physically and in focal length. It is the longer physically aspect that I didn’t fancy. my little spotter scope above weighs 6.1kg all in scope + mount + tripod. I haven’t weighed this one yet but I think it’s going to be nearer 9kg plus EP case.

Short @ollypenrice panic over. I’m not sticking my finger in to check but the rear element looks a long way away and it looks like there is a balk at the back of the focussed anyway. Phew.

Well I hadn’t thought about it till you said! 😱

the 31NT5 will give me a whopping 5.7 degrees :-). Also another reason why i've jumped this time. My astigmatism has gotten to the point it impacts my binocular views (which i enjoy) and i'm not going to wear glasses with them. With this scope i'm hoping dioptrx will help me out. The jury is out on a finder. I would like to fit at least an RDF to speed up initial pointing but i'm also drawn to a finder so i can leave a short FL EP in the diagonal between objects. My challenge for both is I like my whole kit to be low down (i use a short stool) so it's tricky to get either RDF or finder high enough and far enough forward that i can get behind them without sitting on the floor. I don't fancy a RACI finder on this kit. 1st light will be at first opportunity everything else be damned.

1st check on back focus /focus travel looks good. On pylon tops about 1km away everything from a 31NT5 (my most in-focus EP) and 8mm Ethos (my most out-focus EP) look good. I had a bit to spare for in-focus so hopefully even nearer infinity i should be OK. This is with a 2" diagonal and no spacers but including the CAA which i do want to keep on if i can. Maxbright BV's with 1.7GPC and 24mm Panoptic don't come to focus though (at least with the CAA left on). I have a 2.6GPC on order for different reasons but maybe this will help me out here too. i'm also now relieved at committing to it finally this time - this thing is flat and sharp!

pointing looks promising on the Manfrotto MVH612 (this is with nearly all the counterbalance dialled off): and coatings here are creating an invisible objective (nearly): right now i'm off to fit a Clicklock.

now some Takky pics: Symmetrical cradle (it isn't really on upside down) nice and short (important to me for GnG):

i'll put a few pics and few weights and dimensions of the FSQ in this thread later (i struggled to find definitive and useful information myself) but before then i'm just going to put this here (a tribute to my till now most hardworking scope): This Swarovski bird spotting scope has been my GnG for several years. It displaced a Celestron Omni 120mm Achro on a GEM (G4?) because i ended up finding the 120mm refractor just too heavy and tedious to carry out to a nearby park (i don't have a garden). The ATX95 is a 95mm APO with field flattening elements. It gives me 2-degrees and x30 at the wide end (at 3.2mm exit pupil) and a little over 1-degree at x70 and 1.4mm exit pupil at the top end if i don't use an extender. It's sharp to the edge, impervious to dew and condensation and weighs just 2.7kg. It is the Land Rover and the Masda MX-5 of the telescope world! A few greatest hits for this scope include: about a hundred DSO 1sts including M33 (at MPSAS 21.9) and NGC 1999 (at MPSAS 24.4), numerous PNe and faint stellar PNe 1sts including IC 351 at m11.9 and Kohoutek 2-1 at m12, numerous double stars down to about the 4" level of separation (tightest being Struve 227 at 3.8"), all the planets except Mercury, NEB/SEB on Jupiter, albedo features on Mars, Rhea and Titan with Saturn and Venus (most recently at just 2.4% illumination). Its also brought me two comets (NEOWISE and C/2022 E3). I think the smallest Luna feature has been Gambert-G at 5km and for full disk Luna the "right way round - right way up" view is great. In short this scope has been a reliable trooper and it isn't going to get fully retired. What it can't do is easily give me mag over x70 (and that fact limits doubles not glass quality), it has never shown me the polar cap on Mars (Mars flares quite a bit in this scope), and i've never had the contrast to see M110 (M31/32 loads but never M110), and i've never seen M101 at MPSAS 23.3 or M109 at MPSAS 22.4 through it even though i try both quite often. Fatally i also can't comfortably point it more steeply than 45-degrees. All of these things i expect to fix with 10mm less aperture and the FSQ. hahahahahahahahahah. It has big boots to fill!

Alright - i cracked at 16:30. I'll make it up tomorrow. 😇 It's taken me a while to commit to this scope...I'm nervous even now.

Well. It's taken me since March 2020 to finally commit to this scope. So many rainy Sunday afternoons over the last three years reading about it and getting close to buying it then getting my head turned by "just a few more mm aperture" (usually the NP101) and paralysing myself in calculations for limiting magnitude and Rayleigh limits. A few months would pass and i would return to it again and get excited all over again. Well now for better or worse the deed is done. I'm going all in with the FSQ-85 for my GnG and for visual only. A fool and his money and all that...

Priceless photo's too now i imagine. Great looking film shots.

Whoops! ...and now i have to get through ~9hrs working from my desk at home while this sits downstairs 🙂

Nice write up @SwiMatt sounds like you had fun and I personally love a bit of poetic description first thing in the morning 👍

You lot are absolutely terrible 🤣 keep strong @bosun21 keep strong!

@Hans Joakim just looked at those tenba bags. They do look useful indeed. FYI The footprint of the AZ100+clamp+riser is circa 52cm x 45cm x 25cm (hwd). cheers Joe

@Hans Joakim sounds good. You will love the TSA on the AZ100. After I’d dialled in the balance for the TOA the mount just disappears. Or rather it just shrugs off the scope as if the scope weighs nothing. In case you hadn’t seen them you can get bolts from Rowan to separate the mount from the riser by hand (rather than with a hex tool) but it’s such a critical interface I do quite like it done up tight there. Good luck.

Hi there @Hans Joakim thanks for the comment on the set-up. I love it. However you do inadvertently put your finger on a sore spot 🫤. The AZ100 alone (with losmandy saddle) packed beautifully in a Zarges K470 aluminium hard case. A tight fit but perfect. Hugely recommended for the AZ100 if you need to travel with this mount and chuck it about and know it is superbly protected. The AZ100 with Tak clamp and with 200mm riser fitted doesn’t fit in any hard case I have including a large Peli 1600 something so at the moment I pack it last on top of everything else in the back of the Landy wrapped in a blanket but I’m not very happy about it. I could lose the riser but that won’t fully solve the problem and anyway I like the riser. I could lose the riser and fit a losmandy bar to the Tak clamp so I get my neat K470 packing back but I won’t because I really really like the safety (and elegance) of the direct connection of the Tak clamp to the AZ100. It would be a huge faff to remove and refit either/both items at every set up. So what I will probably do (when I pull my finger out) is look out for a reasonably robust medium sized hold-all of some kind and make my own cocoon style padding inside it so I can chuck the AZ100+clamp+riser into it all in one piece but at least then protected from transport rough and tumble and better than only being wrapped in a blanket. Any suggestions for alternatives would be great fully received. 🥴