RedCat51 First Light

[MarkS]

Dee bought me a Red Cat 51 APO refractor (version 2) for my recent 60th birthday.  Focal length is 250mm at f/4.9

It's very nicely made.  The focusing ring is a pleasure to use and it has a rotator and tilt adjuster on the rear.  I love the built in Bahtinov mask!

So here's the first light done in fairly murky sky on Thursday night.  Obviously Orion was much lower in the sky than I would like:



This is 25x2min at ISO 3200 with my newly modified Nikon Z6 camera.  You can see it gives a very useful field of view.

The flat frames weren't perfect (I need to investigate that) so I haven't made a big effort at gradient removal. The stars are certainly not up to Tak Epsilon standards but they are not too bad - very similar to other images I have seen from the RedCat51.  So I already knew what to expect.

Here's the full size version if you want to go pixel peeping:
http://www.markshelley.co.uk/Astronomy/2020/Orion_Redcat_20200312.jpg

Mark

[Carole]

That's come out very well Mark.  If we really want to do pixel peeping, the corner stars are a bit distorted, but that's only on high magnification.  I would certainly be happy with that.  Nice lot of dust showing, so a good first light for both the Redcat and the Nikon.  I see you have just about squeezed in M78 as well.

Those Redcat 2nd generations are really good (the initial version had some problems, I believe to do with tilt). 

I was considering getting one of these as frustrated with some targets being too large for my telescopes and cameras, but when I saw how much they were I decided against it.  I bought instead a Samyang 135mm F2 lens.  I have yet to try it out as not a good time of the year for widefield stuff and Orion is behind the trees most of the night.  Also waiting for a Canon lens to CCD adapter (made in China and Bern is waiting for them to come in).  My Geoptik adapter would do the job, but can't use the filterwheel with it because the foot gets in the way when screwing it on.

Carole

[NoelC]

Pretty amazing Mark.
Noel

[Roberto]

Fantastic result Mark!  Post pictures of your new scope if you can.
Thanks

Roberto

[The Thing]

Very nice. Any filters used e.g. LP? Was it on any sort of mount? Looks a like a good portable option.

[MarkS]

Very nice. Any filters used e.g. LP? Was it on any sort of mount? Looks a like a good portable option.

No filters and I put it on my EQ6 mount. 

Mark