Here's my new setup. A 12 inch f/4 apochromatic refractor w/
no spherical and chromatic aberration on a standard G11 mount. The OTA is less than 4 feet long, weights only 37.25 lbs and has a 7" focuser to hold 6 inch eyepieces. I went from a 30 mm (which has 4 ft eye relief) to a barlowed 3mm (6 inch eye relief) without any loss of light and sharpness. No need for a binoviewer...just place my head into the punch bowl sized rubber eyeguard as the eyepiece lens elements are wide enough for both of my eyes to observe. When the bad seeing occurs, I'll just pop in my atmopsheric turbulence polarizer. And when the objects are low to the horizon...no problem...time to insert the adjustable dispersion prism corrector into the optical path and set it to the current object altitude. This makes me feel like I'm looking at objects at zenith. Best of all, this entire package is extremly portable, cools down in minutes, and cost less than 5 grand. Can't wait until tomorrow night.
no spherical and chromatic aberration on a standard G11 mount. The OTA is less than 4 feet long, weights only 37.25 lbs and has a 7" focuser to hold 6 inch eyepieces. I went from a 30 mm (which has 4 ft eye relief) to a barlowed 3mm (6 inch eye relief) without any loss of light and sharpness. No need for a binoviewer...just place my head into the punch bowl sized rubber eyeguard as the eyepiece lens elements are wide enough for both of my eyes to observe. When the bad seeing occurs, I'll just pop in my atmopsheric turbulence polarizer. And when the objects are low to the horizon...no problem...time to insert the adjustable dispersion prism corrector into the optical path and set it to the current object altitude. This makes me feel like I'm looking at objects at zenith. Best of all, this entire package is extremly portable, cools down in minutes, and cost less than 5 grand. Can't wait until tomorrow night.
