In this short review today, you will find some of my impressions and experiences with the new TS-Optics 110 mm f/6 Flatfield APO Refractor with 1.0x Full-Frame Corrector combined with the TS-Optics ToupTek 2600CP cooled astronomy camera.
Most important specs:
Telescope:
Price: 1999€ new (at the time of review)
Aperture 110 mm / focal length 660 mm / focal ratio f/6
2-element APO objective with ED glass and lanthanum glass from Ohara-Optics
2.7" RAP dual-speed focuser with ball bearing and 360° rotation
Supplied in high quality aluminum carrying case
Field flattener:
Price: included with APO TSAPO110F6FLAT
3-element 1.0x full frame corrector with M48 camera connection
The corrector is designed to work with Full Frame cameras
Camera:
Price: 1799€ new (at the time of review)
Cooling up to 35 °C below ambient temperature
Sony IMX571 APS-C format color sensor
3.76 µm pixel
16 bit ADC
Working distance only 17.5 mm from T2
Unboxing the telescope has been a very smooth experience. It arrived safely in a fairly compact aluminum case. The telescope itself is again wrapped in foil to protect it from dust, which worked very well.
One important thing to mention: it seems there is NO EQ or Losmandy dovetail included, so you have to get that extra. No issue for me since I have a few spare ones around.
The lenses arrived in perfectly clean condition too, the few dust specks visible are on the outside, caused by unboxing the telescope. I could not find any dust or fingerprints inside of the telescope or between the lenses whatsoever. The manufacturer seems to take really good care of cleanliness in their production line which is a good sign for consistency of quality of their products.
Real-world testing:
Getting the telescope set up to work with the field flattener and camera is very easy. I basically just had to unscrew the 2" eyepiece adapter from the telescope and screw on the included adapter that connects the flattener to the tube. Since the flattener's working distance must be set to (apporximately) 55mm, I was able to use the two adapters (T2-M48 16.5mm and T2 extention 21mm) that originally are included with the camera. There are also some plastic spacers included, which you might very most likely need for fine tuning the working distance as you will see later in the review.
After adding an additional guide-scope and camera I mounted everything to my ZWO AM5 for testing purposes and set it up on my balcony.
First I started to take some calibration frames, I've been especially interested in a 300sec dark, to confirm the camera's "amp-glow free" sensor circuitry.
And to no ones surprise, ToupTek holds their promise.
After my first imaging session I also took some flats, as you can see below. Stretched flats look very smooth and there's no unusually strong vignetting or other non-uniformity visible. No surprises there, since I'm using a smaller APSC camera with a telescope and flattener calculated to support much larger full frame sensors.
So I started imaging for several nights, but I just wasn't too lucky regarding the weather conditions. We had strong winds, rain, even some snow and constantly clouded or hazy skies. After a good week of Imaging I finally collected 20 hours of exposure time, from which, I unfortunately was only able to use 3 hrs for my final integration…
Some other things worthy to mention: The focuser has already been set very well from factory, and even after nearly two weeks outside with fairly warm and also freezing temperatures it did not have any issues holding the camera's weight or wiggling around and it also kept focus during the night very well thanks to the integrated "locking" screw.
Star shapes and colors are looking well for a doublet ED APO, only stars in the corners are not perfectly shaped due to the working distance not being perfectly set. So keep in mind to do some fine tuning for perfect results. Otherwise, there is no major tilt, and I didn't notice any other serious aberration either. This telescope - camera combination seems to be a very good fit and delivers surprisingly high resolution and overall image quality.
And now just let the result speak for itself. I purposely did not perform any aggressive processing steps or star reduction to keep the final image as "real" as possible.
Thanks for reading, hope you liked this short review. :)
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