Its plastic and cheesy, but the optics are not too bad - 60mm single MgF2 coated glass doublet achro.  Im using it as a guidescope and it works very well in that role.  Its very lightweight which is a definite plus.  Focuser slop is quite bad, but if the pinion is re-seated properly to mesh well with the rack, and the brass saddle tightened down well, slop is gone.  I also drilled a 1/4-20 threaded hole and use a nylon screw to lock focus down when used with my DSI Pro during guiding.  When this is done, flexure is essentially non-existent.  Im using this to guide an 8f4 Newtonian on ASGT and even without barlowing it, using modern sub-pixel autoguiding software like guidedog and PHd guiding, Ive been able to take upwards of 6 minute subs without star trailing.    

From: | Created on: 10/16/2009 1:48:56 PM