First light for first refractor

[newman]

Regarding apos, I've been eyeing the Explore Scientific 127mm one - carbon tube variant. By all reviews it's an excellent scope, the carbon tube keeps the OTA relatively light, allowing me to get satisfactory performance off a mount that I didn't have to mortgage the house for. At around 1500€ it's not a cheap scope, but as APOs in that range go it's definitely an interesting price point. I still want to get quite a bit of mileage out of my Evostar 120, but the ES 127 apo is definitely a contender for a future scope. It won't take too much room in my apartment, it's relatively portable, optics are (apparently) great and it can be used for both visual and AP.

[Orionis]

Hi Spaceboy,

I have a Tal 100RS and use it predominantly for double stars, lunar, planetary and solar white light.

It's CA is not overly noticable but have tried both the Baader Fringe Killer (FK) and the Baader Semi-Apo (SA) filters and found they reduce the CA levels to a far less noticeable level.

If I had to choose between them my money would be on the SA filter but the FK is not far behind.

With your 150mm f/8 refractor you will probably have more CA than a 100mm telescope at f/10 but it should not be that disturbing. Glad you managed to improve the views with extra cooldown, mine needs about an hour before it really starts to perform at its best.

I find when comparing the Tal to other telescope types like Newtonian they do have their advantages. A lack of diffraction rays makes it far easy to split tight doubles and doubles of differing magnitude where the fainter one may get lost in the diffraction.