Mark Rosengarten Reviews

A member of my club purchased a PST for his own use after looking through my SM40/Tak 60 combo and we got together one mostly cloudy afternoon for a shootout. I was amazed at how little the PST gave up to the SM40 in terms of surface detail. The SM40 won out in terms of fineness of detail on plage and filaments, but the PST was a marvel at teasing out details in the prominences at a higher power and brightness than my SM40 was capable of. Plage was barely visible in quiet regions, but spiculation was vivid. When properly tuned, the stacked PST shows nice prominences, but the surface detail jumps out at you. The disk looked 3-D. Previously unseen plage leapt into detail with a lot of filaments that were simply not visible before. I now have a PST of my own, and the SM40 is on the front of it whenever possible. If I want to go in at higher power on prominences, the PST is used as is, either with a 12mm Cemax or a 9mm ortho. When I want to see the whole disk in the sweet spot, I use a 15mm plossl. The combination of the two filters does create a sweet spot, where the center of the FOV is amazing in detail and then tails off as one goes to the edge of the disk. A 15mm eyepiece really puts the whole disk squarely in the sweet spot. A mount with slow-motion controls is a must for keeping the image there. The image through the stacked PST is a trifle dim, but no dimmer than the view through my SM40/TV76, and massively more detailed. I need to use the SM40s T-max tuner to shove the secondary ghost image out of the FOV so it does not interfere with viewing. This partially blocks the built-in Sol Ranger finder, but not entirely. I put the suns image at the bottom center of the Sol Ranger window and then move the scope up to meet the sun. As the image disappears from the Sol Ranger, it appears in the scope. The PST is small, portable, relatively inexpensive and the views are worth a million words. Go get one. Now.