Explorer scientific ar-152

[Tfws]

About a year ago I brought my first telescope, a Skywatcher mercury 705 which I have been very happy with and has given me a big interest in astronomy. I'm know looking at a new better telescope and am interested in the ar-152. At over double the diameter it should give much clearer views and was wondering if there is anything else at the same price range(£800-£1000) that I should look at.

Thanks, Tom

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

A Newtonian? That kind of money buys a lot of aperture in a Newtonian design. An 8" SCT on an EQ mount (Celestron C8 on CG-5 GOTO) costs 1095 quid at FLO (nice and compact optical tube, much lighter than the 6" AR152). The 10" Newtonian in the same series is just 935 quid (offer at the moment). Scopes like that outperform an achromatic refractor like the AR-152 by a huge margin. The chromatic aberration of a 6" achromat can cause trouble on planets, and the massively larger aperture of the reflector means deep sky objects are way brighter.

[SnakeyJ]

Hi Tom,

I've got one of the short focal length 6" achromats (Bresser Messier AR152S), which is optically F5 - though has a somewhat unusual Petzval 4 element design which gives some field flattening and from improves Chromatic Abberation to around F8 performance. Its a great widefield deep sky performer, but as with all the bigger achromats CA is certainly apparent at higher magnification on brighter objects. That said I find it gives excellent performance for the price and even on worst case lunar viewing I personally found the CA quite manageable/not too intrusive and managed to get some decent images for a 12 panel mosaic.

The ES models are very nicely made, though these are traditional doublets with a great 2" focuser, 2" diagonal, internal baffles, nice illuminated finder, rings and dovetail. The longer focal length (988mm as opposed to my 760mm) gives them a true F6.5, so do expect some CA as above. I'm not sure if ES offer a 1200mm F8 version, but there are very similar models at this fl from Meade and Bresser.