Vixen ED102SS - 1st Light for me (at last !)

[John]

I met Ian (chewy) last Friday to pick up the Vixen ED102SS which I had bought from him. Since then the weather for me (and many others) has been awful so I had to wait until 2:00 am this morning to see anything astro-related through it. This scope has an interesting SGL history having been owned by 3 other SGL members other than myself. All have said how much they liked the scope so I was optomistic when I decided to buy it and eager (putting it mildly ) to look though it.

These scopes were manufactured by Vixen in Japan between 1999 and 2003/4. It has now been replaced by a longer focal length 103mm model. It is a 102mm aperture F6.5 (FL 663mm) refractor which uses ED low dispersion glass in the lens (Vixen have not disclosed the type of ED glass used or which lens element it's used in). The optics are mounted in oversized tube (114mm diameter) with a conventional rack and pinion 2.5 inch diameter focusser. The lens cell is not collimatable. The scope uses a traditional white colour scheme with the metalwork being either pale green (a traditional Vixen colour) or dark grey. The finish is very good - a definate step up from Skywatcher but not quite up to William Optics standards. The US company Orion also marketed these scopes with their logo on instead of Vixen's - other than that they are identical.

I'll add some pics of the scope in due course.

The overall weight of the optical tube is around 4kg and it is only 24 inches long so it's very portable and sits quite happily on my AZ-3 mount for grab and go duties. For high power use I've got a nice EQ3-2 mount which is on the EQ5 tubular steel legs and is very stable. It should carry the Vixen with ease for visual work. Apart from one or two tiny marks on the tube from normal use the scope is in excellent condition. Optically the lens looks clear, bright and dust free. I've noticed that the foil spacers used to separate the lens elements are smaller than the ED100 that I used to own but not as small as the TAL100R which are absolutely tiny !. I don't know what impact, if any, the size of these spacers has on image quality - probably nothing for visual use but I believe that they may have an impact for imagers if they are too intrusive.

The rack on pinion focusser on this scope is excellent - easily the smoothest R&P that I have ever used and a huge improvement over the standard Skywatcher ones. You would almost think you were using a crayford it is that smooth and responsive. On my scope the focus wheels have been upgraded to rather nice solid alloy ones which are a larger diameter than the standard items so allow a bit more control. Ian kindly supplied the scope with a very nice 2 inch dielectric mirror diagonal (WO clone) and a 9 x50 finder. The finder dovetail on the focusser is a tiny bit smaller than the standard Skywatcher but, with a bit of filing to the foot of the finder holder, I've adapted a red dot finder for user with the scope as well.

My all-too-brief 1st light with the scope came in the early hours of this morning when I noticed a gibbous moon showing though a gap in the clouds so I grabbed the scope on the AZ-3 mount and rushed outside. There was no time for cool down so I just stuck my Tele Vue 11mm plossl in the diagonal, took a deep breath and had a look. The field of view at 60x was .83 degrees so the moon was a very nice size but had a fair amount of space framing it. I noticed immediately that there was no false colour, or at least none that I could see. The features on the moons surface were really well defined and "snapped" into focus showing that the optics were good. The boundaries between light a shadow seemed sharply defined and the deep shadows were black - with no extraneous purple visible. The lunar limb was just as I hoped it would look - bright white limb agaist pitch black space. These are very well corrected optics considering the shortish focal length of the scope - at least as good as the ED80's and ED100 that I have previously owned.

I also managed to have a few minutes on a brightish star (Altair I think - there were a lot of clouds about !) and, bearing in mind the lack of cool down time and the conditions, the images were very encouraging at 198x (6.7 plossl, 2x Ultima barlow). Nice sharp airey disk and a concentric rings inside and outside of focus. The scope is clearly in good collimation !.

And that was it ..... for that night anyway. The clouds rolled across and the gaps dissapeared - it was raining lightly within 15 minutes of me getting the scope back inside.

You will have gathered from the above that, even on the basis of this very brief 1st light, that I am very enthusiastic about the Vixen ED102SS. It is a very well made, optically excellent scope that really does hold the potential of being a single scope solution, provided that I can accept that it is just a 4 inch scope with regard to light grasp. From my brief acquaintance with the scope I can heartily recommend it although they don't seem to come up on the used market very often over here so prospective buyers might have to be patient.

As I said above I'll add some pics of the scope soon. For now here is one I pinched from elsewhere:

Cheers,

John

[Whippy]

Nice one John, sounds like you're one happy camper!

Tony..

[geppetto]

Congrats John..

Have lots of fun with it

[MartinB]

A class scope John. That will serve you very well indeed.

[tom.yates]

Great report John as you know i used to own it and if you had decided to not buy it i was gonna get it the scope is a fantastic bit of kit i was pleased to buy it from jamie enjoy

Tom

[Albireo380]

Good report John. These 'scopes do get a good reputation. The weather has been carp for weeks, so glad you got a look through your new 'scope. Nothing worse than new kit and constant bad weather.

Tom

[tom.yates]

You can say that again

[John]

Thanks for some comments folks - I've put a couple of photos of the scope in the equipment photos section if anyones interested.

I agree about the weather

John

[Brass n glass]

Many thanks for a fascinating report. I think the reason they don't come up very often is that most of the Vixen 102 EDs were f9, which is the one the early Synta ED100s were based on. I remember a review somewhere in about 2000 saying the Vixen 102 ED f9 was very nearly as good as the fluorite version - Hugh.