Well usually, you'd say it the other way around: Good news and bad news. But I have a lot more to say about the good news than the bad news.
The bad news is that I toppled over the telescope and broke its mount. I still can't believe it, but yeah so that's how it went. I am thankful that the tube is unharmed. But the mechanism holding the tube on the mount rail it self is broken. It is almost impossible to "fix" it. As far as I can see the mount is made of cast iron. I have to write to Celestron and see if they can send me a replacement part.
The good news is that I finally got the mirror lens. It's a Samyang 500mm with a 2x converter (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0080S9F1E/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00). The lens seems to be sharp enough for the moment, at least as sharp as the 114EQ.
The biggest advantage of the mirror lens is its size. When you take the converter and the lens apart, it fits nicely inside a camera bag. The lens it self is shorter than the Canon 75-300mm telephoto.
On picture quality; like I said, it is not so bad. Obviously for terrestrial imaging, nothing beats a "proper" telephoto lens with auto-focus. But as far as astrophotography goes, auto-focus is pretty useless and given everything is going to be low light anyway and there is a lot of post processing involved, quite a lot of lenses work so long as they don't have any other optical problems (alignment issues, aberration etc.).
So about the photos; took the first astro shot at the moon:
So yeah, there doesn't seem to be much of a difference in the quality of the two images. Hopefully, this one will have lesser collimation errors than the telescope.
Well that's all for now. Hopefully I'd be able to get some more deep sky images and a shot of Jupiter in the next few days.
The bad news is that I toppled over the telescope and broke its mount. I still can't believe it, but yeah so that's how it went. I am thankful that the tube is unharmed. But the mechanism holding the tube on the mount rail it self is broken. It is almost impossible to "fix" it. As far as I can see the mount is made of cast iron. I have to write to Celestron and see if they can send me a replacement part.
The good news is that I finally got the mirror lens. It's a Samyang 500mm with a 2x converter (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0080S9F1E/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00). The lens seems to be sharp enough for the moment, at least as sharp as the 114EQ.
The biggest advantage of the mirror lens is its size. When you take the converter and the lens apart, it fits nicely inside a camera bag. The lens it self is shorter than the Canon 75-300mm telephoto.
On picture quality; like I said, it is not so bad. Obviously for terrestrial imaging, nothing beats a "proper" telephoto lens with auto-focus. But as far as astrophotography goes, auto-focus is pretty useless and given everything is going to be low light anyway and there is a lot of post processing involved, quite a lot of lenses work so long as they don't have any other optical problems (alignment issues, aberration etc.).
So about the photos; took the first astro shot at the moon:
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Well that's all for now. Hopefully I'd be able to get some more deep sky images and a shot of Jupiter in the next few days.
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