Vixen VISAC VC200L
I am a astrophotographer, so what I need is a astrophotography setup. The Vixen VC200L is a 8" f9 cassegrain telescope with a corrector at the
back of the scope. Vixen calls this a VISAC ("Vixen Sixth-Order Aspherical Catadioptric"). The corrector provides a coma free field; even for wet film astrophotography. The primary mirror has a special shape
using the High-Precision Poly-Order Aspherical Mirror Molding Technique from Vixen. It also uses special coatings. The result is a mirror
that provides very sharp images free of sperical and chromatic abberations. Most reviewers say that this is the Deepsky Astrophotographer best
kept secret or "a poor man's RC".
Vixen ED80sf
The Vixen ED80sf is a cheap semi-apochromat wich uses a doublet with ED coatings. It uses the same ED objective from Orion but the "look and feel"
is better. The ED lens is a doublet which corrects very good in green and red, but a slightly less better for the blue part of the spectrum.
That's why pictures made with ED doublets often have blue halo's around the stars. The Vixen ED80 has a longer baffle tube. The focusser
is sufficient to use for CCD astrophotography. It's a lightweight perfect for widefield astrophotography. The scope pretty is slow (f8) so for my
camera this is perfect.
SBIG ST10XME
The CCD camera is a SBIG ST10xme with a dual chip for autoguiding. This NABG chip has a QE of almost 90%. A CFW8 filterwheel is
attached with the use of SBIG custom scientific LRGB filters. The camera has a large field of view (2184 x 1472) with small pixels (6.8µm).
This perfect for me, to do medium size deepsky astrophotography.
114mm F8 Newton
I have also a grab & go telescope which I use mainly as a allround instrument. It is a 4.5" F8 Newton on a Astro3 mount.
This is the instrument I use for visual observations of the sun. The scope is rather old and it's the intrument I used when I began
with this hobby. So it has also a special value to me. :-)