ZWO Atmospheric dispersion corrector

[Supernova74]

Hi people I was wondering has anyone had any experience useing the ZWO dispersion corrector my current set up is an Meade 12” ACF sct I understand it comprises of useing to Scott glass prisms in conjunction with each other do you get any unwanted artefacts or defects by useing prisms in this device and do thay actually work!? Price wise thay seem not to be to bad and not an Astronmical price excuse the punt.i also notice that the ADC has a bubble level what exsacly is that for and can I use it in a star diagonal also it’s sad thay don,t do an 2” eyepiece version which is a shame however I can most probably see the reason why that most medium to high power eyepieces are 1.25” which mostly I view planets with anyway.it would also be interesting to know if anyone has tried it on some deep sky objects which are lower in the meridian even the device is only specifically used for the planets 

[Paz]

I have one of these and use it for visual observing. I've only used it on the planets and moon, I would guess with DSO's that light dispersed as CA will be very dim anyway and so I would not expect to see much noticeable benefit.

I have found that it can take out atmospheric CA but there is a bit of workload setting it up and it takes a bit of practice to get used to, especially if you rotate your eyepieces to the side instead of having your eyepieces upright when it can get confusing.

Recently I've been doing a lot of observing of Venus and although this can reverse out the red-limb-blue-terminator effect the reality is that the best view I could get of Venus having tried loads of filters and set ups was just a ND0.9 filter and no ADC or anything else. There was still a bit of atmospheric CA but a much cleaner image with the  ND0.9. The ADC is 4 extra surfaces and 2 extra mediums and it creates a little but of loss of contrast imo.

That said sometimes it has done better, I'm sure on Jupiter it made a bigger difference for me personally but without digging out my notes I can't be more specific.

Edited April 18, 2020 by Paz

[fate187]

I had one of those ZWO adc. Unfortunatelly, it introduced astigmatism. While sharpness increased especially on Saturn, colors were paler compared to the views without adc. I sold the unit and bought another much more expansive brand, that is absolutly clear of astigmatism.

If you are imaging you mitigate the effect due to AD by selectively working on each color channel and aligning them in the processing steps involved. But this advice comes from an deep sky astrophotographer, so take it with a grain of salt

best
Michael