Zeiss Telementor II - quick first light

[Stu]

I foolishly sold my last Telementor (a I rather than II), so jumped at the chance of getting another. This lovely scope arrived today, looking in excellent condition, particularly the optics.

Somewhat remarkably, although it is hazy out there, I managed a quick first light with it, just on the Ercole mount which takes it very easily.

It has a 1.25" visual back, so I have used my Tak prism and started with a 24mm Panoptic giving x35, then also used the 7.2 to 21.5mm zoom which gives between x39 and x116, a great range for this scope given the inevitably small exit pupils at very high powers. The 'finder' is actually two 'gun sights' at either end of the long tube, something that works surprisingly well.

The Moon was hazy, but looked very sharp with very little CA, and Venus showed a very clear phase with minimal flaring; I guess the haze was helping to dim it down a bit. There was inevitably some CA around it but nothing too bad.

A quick tour showed me Sigma Orionis (which just about showed the faint 4th star when seeing allowed), the Trapezium which was nice and sharp, whilst Rigel showed its little secondary at higher powers.

Best of all was probably Castor which appeared a two, slightly unequal bullseye. Lovely stuff.

I forgot to mention, this scope previously belonged to Roger Vine, of scopeviews.co.uk fame. It was used to add extra info to this review I believe.

http://scopeviews.co.uk/ZeissTelementor.htm

[Cjg]

One of the NAS crew has a Telementor, with a few of the .95 eyepieces and  views are superb. Congrats on getting yourself another, looks a "keeper."

Chris

[Paul73]

At first glance I thought that they had forgotten to include a focuser!

Enjoy your new toy.

Paul

[Stu]

8 minutes ago, Paul73 said:

At first glance I thought that they had forgotten to include a focuser!

Enjoy your new toy.

Paul

Thanks Paul. It's an unusual arrangement but seems to work well. Plenty of focus range, may even be binoviewer friendly.