tompato

This is good news for their upcoming Skyhunter Goto Tracking Mount as it makes little sense to have a portable Goto mount that then requires a laptop or computer to run the iPolar functionality on it. I'm guessing they'll maybe be hoping to release the app to coincide with that new mount? Just a guess.

I'd have thought that the Samyang 135mm f2 will be superior. Some old glass is very good, especially for photography where you generally don't need a massively flat field, but not so great at the corners. Also the coatings have come a long way from back in the day, as I understand it. Also also, the Samyang 135mm is a wonderfully sharp lens even at f2 so it must be packing some fine glass.

Flange distance for Canon EF is 44mm and the Pentax M42 is 45.46mm so your adapter needs to be pretty thin, if yours measures over that then that might be why. Not related to the issue directly, but I have a couple adapters from Urth and they've been good.

It's not too bad here, neighbours don't have anything silly and the council turns off all the streetlights after 11.45pm, other than a single light on the corner of each road and on the larger roads through town. I assume cost cutting, but it suits astronomy. We moved in a few months pre-Covid so I'm not sure what it was like beforehand though really.

You may want to wait til the summer and look at both the new Skywatcher Starguider GTI and the iOptron Skyhunter which both should be good for astrophotography with a DSLR and come with GoTo.

Looks interesting, if it come in under the price of the Zwo Harmonic and has those payloads to weight ratio it looks tempting. I realise the Zwo is uses the harmonic gear setup on both RA and DEC (I think?) but this hybrid approach with a worm/belt system on the DEC might work perfectly well and if it saves on manufacturing costs...

It's up for sale on the FLO website now, seems maybe a tad expensive when the FRA 400 is roughly the same price, although I guess this is half a stop faster.

There's also that new Askar FRA 300 Pro. Not sure how much it will be but presumably less than the Askar FRA 400.

Welcome back, usually a good amount of clear skies over in the East. There's a few astronomy clubs in Suffolk as well.

Yeah I agree, it would kinda go against the portable astrophotography target market of this mount I would have thought.

The Goto does, but I'm not sure about iPolar having a mobile app for polar alignment?

This looks lovely, great that there's some real competition for the portable astrophotography and visual mount category between iOptron and Skywatcher. Really tempted to upgrade from my Skyguider Pro to this. The wedge looks the same in which case it's not great, but easy enough to upgrade I imagine. Like you say the only downside might be the inflated cost of the mount due to iPolar, but hopefully iOptron see sense and offer it without seeing as like you say there's plenty of good software solutions for alignments.

Don't RVO do servicing and test reports on refractors and stuff now?

Got a couple of upgrades for my Scopetech Zero mount - new saddle and knobs for the slow motion controls 👍

Yeah I can't see this being a goer at anything close to £600. £450 to £500ish for the mount only would have been palatable. Maybe something nearer £600 would be okay if it had a higher payload than say the AZ Gti.

Yeah seems a few YouTubers have come out with videos today, Nico Carver has one up as well. It's strange as it does look like it should be able to take a bit more weight than the standard Star Adventurer but it's rated for the same max payload. Skywatcher USA is pricing it at $640 so it'll be interesting what the UK pricing ends up being.

@Swillis If you do want to keep an eye on used Samyang 135mm prices this website is handy for keeping an eye on them - https://usedlens.co.uk - it searches most used camera shops and eBay.

Yeah that's a good shout, especially if you were marooned - the ease of a Dob mount, lots of light gathering and dark skies would be amazing.

Yeah I don't believe the other flattener can work with a DSLR so the Starizona EvoFF v2 is the only option. On a somewhat unrelated note, with the eBay promotion that's on at the moment you can get £50 off an Evolux 62ed which brings it down to £309. The Skywatcher field flattener for it is expensive, but maybe there's cheaper ones that are compatible.

Evoguide 50ed is £189 and the EvoFF v2 is £96 which brings a total to £285 so yeah that's probably not too far off in Euros. That said, you can't really compare used price of something with new prices, as I'm sure you could get a used Evoguide 50ed for nearer £100. Still, hard to compare to a camera lens because this can be used for guiding in the future if you upgrade to a bigger astrophotography telescope and connection to other astrophotography equipment might be easier, so it's a bit more multipurpose. You could go down the route of a used 200mm Canon lens - I'm not sure what you'll end up having to stop down that Canon 200mm to though? Might not end up to dissimilar to the f4.8 of this guidescope but I don't know - plus you'll have to deal with refraction spikes (depends if you like them). To be honest though if I was going down the route of a used camera lens I think I would spend a little bit more on a used Samyang 135mm as that can be used well only stepped down to f2.8 or something and is very highly praised.

If you could only have one telescope costing around £1000 with you on a desert island...what would it be? My conundrum is the future Mrs tompato wants to get me a telescope as a sort of wedding gift that I will keep for a long time and enjoy. The budget is around a grand - I'm sure I could maybe convince her to take some cash from me to put towards it as well if it meant something slightly more expensive that would never need replacing. I like visual and astrophotography. Currently for visual I have an old Orion Optics UK 6 inch reflector f/5 and I use an Evoguide 50ED setup for astrophotography. I think maybe a modest sized refractor for visual might be good, or something to improve my astrophotography. My ideas so far are a Redcat 51 for the astrophotography route or maybe one of the Scopetech refractors for visual use (although storing those might be an issue). Another idea was the baby Tak FS60CB but the sheer amount of accessories and adapters for that thing scare me from a astrophotography sense, although I guess it is less scary from a visual sense - but its not cheap when you start adding the accessories and stuff on. Anyway, I thought it might be fun to get people's thoughts on what they would choose if they could only use that one scope, kinda like a desert island telescope.

I have added the frame details and exact kit I used to the above post if it is of any interest to people. I'm going to hopefully get some time to do some more frames soon once I figure out what my next target will be. I also had a look at individual frames and stretched them to see if I could see the ring and I couldn't, so I think that might be self inflicted somewhere along the image processing that I carried out.

Hi Simon, I'm one of the people who have been using and posting about their experiences with the Evoguide 50ed, I'm happy to try and answer any questions but please bare in mind I am rather new to all this astrophotography stuff so others might be more knowledgeable. 1. I don't believe the focal length is effected, it is just a field flattener and not a reducer, so it stays at 242mm focal length. 2. It does yes when using the EvoFF v2, I have been using a Canon 600d. I am not sure what the whole imaging circle is when using the EvoFF as I'm not sure Starizona actually say, it seems fine for APC-C but it might be too small for a full frame DSLR, I don't know on that one, someone else may have an answer. It is also compatible with most astrophotograph cameras as well because it has 55m back focus so you could even use some attachments such as a filter wheel with one, but there wouldn't be room for those sorts of things with a DSLR I don't believe. 3. The rings supplied with the scope are...poor. I have been speaking with a kind gentleman called Greg on eBay who was one of the sellers on there selling 3d printed clamps/rings for the Evoguide 50ed. I had a chat with him and he put together a modified version with attachment points on the top which I use with a finder and guidescope and it really is a fine setup. I'll attach a photo and review of these in time, as I said I would to Greg. If you're interested in taking a look they can be found by searching for the user 'craftology3d' on eBay. I also got a Bahtinov mask 3d printed as well (green to match the scope). As for general comments, the scope has performed well. I think any bad points are largely down to my lack of ability to be fair, and even then I've managed to get some images I'm really proud of considering I've only had a half dozen or so imaging sessions in my astrophotography time so far. I'm sure others could point out slight issues with the optics, but from my untrained eye I don't think anything could give me the results I'm getting at such a good price point. I have mine mounted to a Skyguider Pro at the moment. Only downsides I can think of is nowhere perhaps to easily mount a filter, I've been using an EOS clip in filter with mine at the moment and that works fine, that and the rings it comes with which are frankly rubbish, but the dovetail is okay - in fact I mounted the 3d printed clamp/rings mentioned above to the supplied dovetail as I quite like the green.

Yeah you can see it visually on the image as well just about - I think it might have something to do with having a gradient on the background and I used some of Siril's tool to flatten the background gradient and then I combined that with a lot of stretching. There was some vignetting on the original non stacked frames when stretched in each corner and the background gradient removal seems to have kinda inverted this. I'm not really that experienced yet and on more recent imaging sessions I grabbed flat frames so that might help alleviate the issue. I've attached a couple more images I've taken with this setup, but I don't have the details immediately to hand on what settings etc I used but I'll update the post when I find my notes. I hope this shows what this little guidescope is capable of with even my basic skills. Each image was taken with the Evoguide 50ed, EvoFF v2, Canon 600d (Unmodified), Skyguider Pro, Innorel LT364C Tripod. Rosetta Nebula (Caldwell 49) - 1 hour - 61 Light (60 secs, ISO 800), 30 Dark, 32 Flat, 32 Dark Flat, 20 Bias. Flame (NGC 2024) & Horsehead Nebula in Orion - 1 Hour - 61 Light (60 secs, ISO 800), 30 Dark, 20 Bias Orion Nebula (Messier 42) - 39 mins - 39 Light (60 secs, ISO 800), 30 Dark, 20 Bias Edit - added the details for each image, there's not too many frames but it shows you what the scope can do even with a small mount of total integration time.

Does anyone have a rough idea at what sort of cost we might be looking at for it?