Last night i decided to see how far i could push the little Maksutov! I usually stay within the golden rule of 2x aperture in millimetres for the mak thats around 200x, which isn’t a great deal for a long focal length telescope. After trying to split Epsilon Lyrae (double,double) with mixed results on it’s last outing, i decided to push a little further. The result surprised me a great deal, i started out with the 32mm ep, then down to 15mm then 12mm all with good focus and beautiful difraction rings both in and out of focus. The 9mm also produced the goods and so i reached for the barlow.
Then came the surprise, using a Celestron 8-24 zoom and Revelation Astro 2x barlow i got the split on the double,double with nice clean break at around 20mm on the EP (10mm with the barlow) giving a theoretical 130x the only issue was a difraction ring on the northern of the two doubles that kept obscuring it’s secondary. This was either due to seeing conditions, the scope, the EP setup or me… so i decided to push further, the result cheered me up no end…. i wound the zoom down to it’s 8mm setting (4mm barlowed) and was rewarded with small round stars with perfect difraction rings, each double looking like a pair of fried eggs. The stars were spaced across about 80% of the fov, so i kept turning the slow controls on the skyteeII. That was when i realised i had jumped to 325x mag and the image was still clear! Don’t get me wrong.. the stars weren’t pinpoint, they were small round dots with a fine difraction ring but they were cleanly separated. Wide splits you could drive a bus through 🙂
I considered the fact that Lyra wasn’t at the zenith, and that Vega was twinkling in a far from steady atmosphere, i was impressed by the view at 325x using mediocre equipment. I would normally use dedicated EP’s not a zoom.. and i try not to barlow if i can help it. There was a little false colour thrown in by the barlow but nothing serious and the small dim star sat between the two pairs at around 150″ from the AB pair was still a perfect pinpoint. In my 60mm refractors the view at this mag would have been impossible to focus, there would have been so much blur that the doubles would fade into one blob of fuzziness. Time as usual ran out… i would have liked to have run the Celestron 80 refractor through the same test for comparison but overall i was impressed a great deal by the 102 mak.
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