This is an 80mm refractor. And this is an 80mm refractor. And this, you may have guessed it by now, is also an 80mm refractor. So why does this one cost $130? This one costs $600 and this one costs $1,750. In this video, I'll explain why and I'll share everything that you should look out for when buying your first refractor telescope for astrophotography. Hey, welcome. This is Nico from Nebula Photos. This is a channel all about amateur astrophotography. And I cover everything about that hobby, including tutorials, explainers, and reviews like this video today. And since this is a review comparing these three telescopes, I need to share a few disclosures up top here.
Both the Asgar 80PHQ and the SUVONI SV503 telescopes were sent to me by the respective manufacturers and that was at my request for the purpose of this review. But I'm making this video completely independently and so Asgar and SV science, I've bought myself for the channel. But with financial support from my generous patrons over on patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. And that support is really what keeps the lights on for this channel, but I'll say more about it at the end of the video.
So let's first jump into the design of a refractor and what makes a design well suited for astrophotography. And we will specifically be looking at the design of these three telescopes, of course. So the first thing that you want to look for is how many glass elements are actually in the tube. And then how many of those elements are ED glass? ED stands for extra low dispersion. And without at least one element being made of ED glass, you get a lot of blue, violet, or magenta fringing on your stars. And that can be really pretty distracting and hard to remove in post-processing without leaving some kind of artifact.
Now there are fringe killer or minus violet filters, and those can work pretty good for removing it optically. But keep in mind there's no free lunch. And with those filters, you'll be removing some colors from your photos. So in order to treat the symptom of the problem stars, you might get worse color reproduction otherwise. So it's always best if you can afford it to get a refractor with ED glass extra low dispersion glass. So in my comparison here, the Ryan short tube 80 is a doublet with two glass elements, but neither have ED glass. This is also a doublet, the SV bony. But one of those elements is an ED glass, an FPL, F51. And the ascar is a quadruplet, meaning four elements and two of those are ED glass. So two, one, zero. Now another word you'll see that is related to the number of glass elements and the type of glass that they're using is apple chromatic or acromatic.
And this refers to the telescope's ability to focus all the colors at the same time, all the colors in the visible spectrum. And that's an important ability, especially when you're shooting with DSLRs or one shot color cameras. There's some debate online whether a doublet with ED glass can count as apple chromatic and apple chromatic telescope. My opinion is really what matters is the images. So if you can take a photo with an ED doublet and not see any obvious fringing on the stars, then we should basically consider that apple chromatic, whether it is technically or not. But of course, people will have different standards for this kind of thing. And some people are much pickier than others. So I'll be presenting a little bit later in the video, actual image comparison so you can really decide for yourself what level of perfection you need.
But general takeaways here, again, a refractor with more ED glass is going to give you better color reproduction tighter stars typically. And the worst kind of refractor for especially for one shot color camera is an acromat. Last thing about this is that with a doublet or a triplet, you'll typically want a field flattener or a flattener reducer. With this SV bony, there's a matched flattener reducer available. So I've included that in the price of $600. I didn't see one available for the Orion. And with the way this focuser is designed, I don't think there are any on the market that would work. Now the Ascar does not need a field flattener because it's designed for imaging. And so the corrector is actually built in to the telescope design because it's a quadruplet. But Ascar does offer an optional reducer. It's just a reducer only, you know, no flattening element. But I did use it for these image tests and included it in the price here.
So that's a pretty cool feature of the Ascar is that you can use it at 600 millimeter focal length. If you want to go at F7.5, or you can use that 0.76 x reducer to bring it down to like 450 millimeters. Let's next look at price. I picked these three telescopes on purpose as I think it gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect at each sort of type of telescopes. So this is an acromat, not really designed for imaging. It's more designed as like a quick go to scope or guide scope. And they started around $100 go up from there. This is an ED doublet $600 with the field flattener is pretty sort of standard on the low end. And this is more like a premium astrograph kind of refractor. So 1750 is not unusual. They go up from there. There's some that are cheaper, but typically for smaller astrographs like a red cat or an FRA 300. So for an 80 millimeter astrograph, I think this ascar is competitively priced. So I'd rather not go really into the discussion of value because I think that's really subjective.
所以,Ascar 的一个很酷的功能是你可以在 600 毫米焦距下使用它。如果你想用 F7.5,可以这样用,或者你可以用 0.76 倍的减焦镜将它降至大约 450 毫米。接下来我们来看一下价格。我特意选择了这三种望远镜,因为我认为这能让你对不同类型望远镜的价格有一个很好的了解。这是一种消色差镜,不是真正为成像设计的。它更像是一个可以快速使用的望远镜或导星镜。它们的起价大约在 100 美元左右,价格会从那里上涨。这是一种 ED 双合胶镜,带有视场平坦器的价格大约为 600 美元,这在低端市场上是比较标准的。而这种是更像高端天文摄影用途的折射望远镜,1750 美元并不罕见,价格会从那里上涨。有些价格更便宜,但通常是较小的天文摄影望远镜,比如 red cat 或者 FRA 300。所以对于 80 毫米的天文摄影望远镜,我认为这个 Ascar 价格具有竞争力。我不想深入讨论价值问题,因为这是非常主观的。
It's really just about what you're looking for in a telescope. So after watching this whole review, I'm just really going to leave it up to you again, what level of perfection you're trying to achieve with like the tightness of your stars and how much fringing they have. That's the main thing that sort of differentiates these, especially these two on the higher end. The one thing I do want to say about price and cost is you really don't want to skimp on the mount. So if you could save money somewhere, save money with the telescope and the camera, I'd say, especially the camera doesn't matter that much, but the mount is very important.
So for something like an 80 millimeter refractor, this one's a little bit lighter than the other two. But you could go with one of these like small mounts like I have here, like the ioptron smart EQ, but I'd really suggest going up to like a EQM 35 HEQ5, an ioptron 726, something like that's going to be better. And I tested all three on my EQ6R. Again, probably overkill maybe, but I wanted to make sure that I was just testing the optical performance. So I used a very good mount so that there was no problem with tracking.
Now let's go ahead and look at the physical characteristics of these telescopes, including the weight, the focusers, the build quality, and everything that's sort of included, like the rings or the brackets and things like that. The Orion short tube 80 is 15 inches long or 380 millimeters. The dew shield does not retract, but it's already so compact that it's not really a big deal. When I bought it, I remember it just coming with this small vixen dovetail plate, bolted onto the bottom. But I looked online now and I see there's a bunch of different configurations with different accessories.
So if I were to get it today with imaging in mind, I'd probably get the rings because with this configuration, there's no way to rotate. Well, if I had rings, I could at least rotate the whole scope in the rings. And sometimes rotation is very nice to have. In terms of what it comes with, it does come with this scinta style finder shoe built into the focuser. Comes with a plastic cap for the front. And the focuser is a single speed. It's not a two inch. It's, and you can hear it makes a little bit of sort of crinkly noise that I associate with low quality focusers. It's not perfectly smooth.
And so the focuser is not a full two inch focuser, so you can't use any of your two inch eyepieces or any 48 millimeters accessories with this. This also makes finding a field flattener for this very difficult because all of the third party field flatteners have 48 millimeter threads on the telescope side. But the good thing that they did with the focuser is this is 42 millimeter standard T thread. So that means you can just get standard T adapters, not the wide T adapters, but just the normal M42 T adapters to get your DSLR or mirrorless camera put onto the telescope. And I should also say that because it doesn't use any kind of field corrector, you can just put your camera on and then as soon as it reaches focus, you're in focus. There's no worry about particular back focus with this telescope. The focuser does extend quite a ways, as you can see, but you could also put on spacers as if you needed even more back focus travel. But I've had no problem with getting into focus with the Ryan short tube 80. And the telescope has a focal length of 400 millimeters and a focal ratio of F5, which is printed right on the scope right there.
Let's move on here to the SV Boney SV 503 80 ED. It's close to around 18 inches or 450 millimeters long with the dew shield retracted. And then with the dew shield extended, it is about 24 inches or 620 millimeters long. The weight with the field flattener reducer installed back here is around 6.6 pounds or three kilograms. So not heavy by any means, but also not super light like the Ryan was. It comes with very nice rings with nice big knobs, as you can see, for loosening and tightening. And it also has a Vixen dovetail plate installed on the bottom.
It comes with a metal front cap. And it doesn't actually come with a synthesized finder shoe. I installed that afterwards. I just got this off eBay, but it does come with plenty of places to put one if you so desire, but it doesn't come with this. So this is be something you have to add. It has a very nice two speed focuser. There's the course and there's the find, and it works very, very well. It's very smooth.
So I've had no problems with that. And it does offer full 360 rotation on the focuser. You just loosen that knob right there. And then you can rotate the focuser and then tighten it back up. You see, the focuser does have gauge markings in millimeters. So that's nice for repeatable focus. In terms of installing the field flattener, it has these three thumb screws that have a compression ring inside here. And then the field flattener simply slides into the focuser like that, which works fine. And then the field flattener itself has normal 48 millimeter thread on the camera side.
If you do plan to get this telescope, again, this is the SV Boney SV 503, I'd highly recommend getting this 0.8 X photo reducer and field flattener, because that's going to make the stars a lot better. And with the reducer, it comes down from 560 millimeters F7 to 448 millimeters F 5.6, which is a very nice focal length and ratio for lots of deep sky targets. Alright, so that's the SV Boney SV 503 ADED in terms of its physical makeup.
Okay, and finally, we have the Asgar 80 PHQ Q for quad. And this one is in a fairly new line of quadruplet telescopes from Asgar that all have long native focal length for their respective aperture. So this is an 80 millimeter scope, but it's at F 7.5 600 millimeter focal length. But then you can also get a 0.7 X times reducer for it. And that brings it down to 456 millimeter focal length at F 5.7. And what's really cool about this line of telescope and the reducer is that both the native focal length and with the reducer, you're corrected for a full frame sensor. And so that's actually fairly rare in a telescope at this price point that it would be well corrected out to full frame.
好的,最后我们来看 Asgar 80 PHQ Q 天文望远镜。这款望远镜属于 Asgar 最新的四镜组望远镜系列,具有相对较长的本机焦距。这个型号的口径是80毫米,光圈比为 F 7.5,焦距为600毫米。此外,您还可以购买一个0.7倍的焦距减速器,使焦距缩短到456毫米,光圈比变为 F 5.7。有趣的是,无论是本机焦距还是使用减速器后的焦距,这系列望远镜都能很好地适应全画幅传感器。在这个价格区间中,能够做到对全画幅的良好校正是相当少见的。
So that is the big reason why this one is so much more expensive than the SV Boney. This one's 1,750 SV Boney is 600 is because of that being able to have it really meant for full frame imaging. Okay, with the dew shield retracted like this, it's about the same length as the SV Boney 18 inches long or 450 millimeters. With the dew shield extended out, it's just a little bit shorter than the SV Boney. It's 22 inches or about 570 millimeters long.
The weight of this scope with the reducer is 10.6 pounds or 4.8 kilograms, which is fairly heavy for an 80 millimeter refactor. But quads are always heavy for their size because there's big glass elements and there's four of them in this while there's only two in the other two telescopes I showed you which were doublets. And then also the reducer itself adds a couple pounds since it's a three inch reducer. So that's a fairly large reducer. The telescope comes with very nice rings with tons of tapped holes all around and a nice long green dovetail plate, fix and style.
It comes with this top handle that I've been using to manipulate the telescope. It's a metal front cap with the name of the telescope on the front. And then one thing that is really cool, which I've never seen before, is it comes with not just one, but four different options, threaded connections for connecting your camera or your spacers or whatever you're using. So let me show you how this works.
So each of these back here is another threaded connection. We have M 76, M68, M54 and M48. So all kinds of different threaded connections are included. You don't have to go out and find those if you have a specialty connection that's needed. This is the reducer, the .7x reducer. And I just want to show you how this goes into the telescope. You use this stack of threaded connections that comes with the telescope. You thread the reducer in here like that. And then the whole thing slides perfectly into the focuser and then threads onto the back of the telescope. So I thought that was a really neat design to have the reducer have a threaded connection into this adapter that then threads onto the back of the focuser. And there's diagrams included showing you how to use all these different adapters.
Since it is a quad, if you use it with outer reducer, you can just attach your camera to the back here and just come to focus. And as soon as you're in focus, you're good to go. With the reducer installed, you're going to want 55 millimeter back focus. In terms of markings, this both has markings for focal distance, but it also has markings for the rotator, which is really handy. I wish all telescopes had that.
So it's a 360 rotator and it has every degree marked right there. It comes with one Sintef style finder shoe standard, but it also has a place for another right there. You could easily install a ZWO-EAF or other electronic focuser and there are already mounting holes. And lastly, I'll just say this is a very substantial three inch focuser that feels nice and sturdy and quite premium. It does have two speeds, of course.
Okay, now we're on to my favorite part, which is actually looking at the images and doing some comparisons. Before I launch into that, let me just show you the stats of this imaging session. So I was shooting the Iris Nebula from Portal 4. The moon was new. I waited until the Iris was very high up in the sky, which was 2 to 3 a.m., which is also the darkest time, I think. And then I was using a Sky Watcher EQ 6R, which is a nice beefy mount, so no problems with tracking.
But just to make sure I was also guiding with a William Optics Uniguide 50mm and an ASI 290mm Mini. I was using a Sigma FP full frame mirrorless camera. It does not have a low pass filter, but it was not modified. So it's a very good camera, I think, for testing for these kinds of things, because it's going to have a nice sharp image without the low pass filter to really give us a good indication of the optical quality of these telescopes. I was shooting at ISO 1600, and for each telescope, I took 4x4 minutes in terms of exposure.
So I could have tried to take more, but I wanted to really limit it to just one part of the sky as quickly as possible to try to keep the bias from changing sky conditions out of this as much as possible. So I did it all within an hour by moving very quickly. Okay, so first let's look at just some raw frames, highly stretched with the auto stretch. And the point of this is really just to look at what a single 4-minute raw looks like and how much vignetting is affecting the image.
There is some shadowing of the corners, vignetting in all of these images. This is the Orion short tube 80. There's the SV Boney SV503. And then here is the Ascar 80PHQ. And the way that it has vignettes on the Ascar is interesting. And I'm not sure I'd be interested to try it with another full frame camera just to make sure that it's not some quirk of the Sigma FP that's creating this kind of vignette. I'm not really sure, but it does look sort of odd.
These ones look more normal. But then the next question, of course, is well, how does that calibrate out with flats? That's what the Orion looks like after I calibrated with flats, darks, and bias. Here's the SV Boney a bit better. And then there's the Ascar a bit better still. Now, I'll get to this more as we go, but the SV Boney isn't corrector isn't really designed for full frame. So you can sort of see that, that it really sort of corrects out to about there.
And then there's some weirdness. While the Ascar is a full frame corrected telescope and the reducer is also for full frame. And the Orion, we have no field corrector. So we really only have a small section here in the middle that has sharp stars. And then it very quickly gets sort of crazy. And just to show that another way, here is just the corners and the center.
So you can see the center of the Orion is quite sharp. But then in the corners, it's pretty bad. SV Boney is quite a bit better. But if we look out into the corners of a full frame sensor, you can see we have triangles instead of round stars. While with the Ascar, they are still quite sharp and quite round. And so I've emphasized this, I think, a number of times, but that's what you're really paying for with an astrograph like the Ascar is the ability to get fairly round sharp stars all the way out into the corners of a four frame sensor, which you're not going to be able to do with a scope that's more like $600.
But you could just use a smaller sensor with this telescope. And it would work quite well. Okay. And then this next set is, well, how we saw what it looks like with just calibration, it looked like that. But then if we run a dynamic background extraction, how does it look after that? And you can see the Orion gets quite a bit flatter. As does SV Boney. And the Ascar looks perfect. I mean, that's a very flat field with really no problems there.
And then, oh, this is just that same picture we just saw, but without the stars, and it shows you that the SV Boney is corrected. This doesn't look like quite APSC, maybe just a but pretty close to APSC. And then the full frame part is just not corrected at all. And we're getting a lot of light fall off out there. Same thing with the Orion Starless. The DBE seemed to work a little bit better though. Or maybe it's just a stretch them differently. And then here's the Ascar, again, pretty flat. Okay.
And then here is the maybe what a lot of people have been waiting for. Here's my final images as I would process each one, including the crop. So with the Orion I'd crop quite a bit in, just to that sort of central portion. So again, here's the full Orion frame and I'd cropped basically right into the center to avoid all of these weird stars out on the corners. But after you do that, it looks pretty good. The one sort of thing that stands out about this image, well two things actually.
One is we get all this sort of violet fringing on all the bright stars. And then the other thing is we're not getting a whole lot of color on the iris. And I did try to bring it out and I'm still just not really getting that sort of cool blue reflection nebula color. I'm not sure why. But we do get some of the dust around the iris. Here's the SV Boney. And again, I cropped down. It's probably around APSC, but it's a little bit square than APSC is what I just I did a pretty lazy crop. I didn't try to correct this ring. So I really just took a crop and went boom, boom, boom, boom, and cropped like that to get this.
And then here is the ascar. And with the ascar, I could use the full frame. Now I might still crop this down because this was just a very short integration. So there's not a whole lot going on. Yet. But if you imagine if I shot this for several hours, this whole frame would fill up with that beautiful dust and cepheus and it would look really cool. Okay. And last comparison, I just cropped in to the center of each one and registered these together just to show you sort of the deep, you know, the detail difference and the sharpness difference at the center of the frame. If that's something you're interested in.
So I don't know how clear it is. It's clear to me that the the ascar is sharper than the SV Boney. And then it should be clear even to everyone that they're both sharper than the Orion. But let me actually zoom in a little bit just to really drive this home. Let me pick some pick a star field that has sort of a mix of smaller stars and bigger stars. That looks good. Okay. So this is pretty illustrative of what you're getting for 130, 600 and 1750. So you can see there's a pretty dramatic difference here between the 130 and 600.
We drop a lot of this sort of ugly fringing around the stars and we get a huge sharpness increase because you can see all of these dimmer stars that are basically invisible with the Orion. Now the difference between here and here you can see is much more subtle. The stars are a little bit sharper. But really the big thing that you're paying for is not the the center sharpness getting so much better. But the fact that the corners and full frame are so much better. It's because see here you get the triangle stars here. The corner stars are almost as sharp as they are in center. So that's what's so impressive. And that's why you pay more for a scope like the Asgar.
So if you like my videos and you want to accelerate your learning, consider joining there for as little again is $1 a month or there's also a $3 a month here and a $7 a month here. And again, the link is patreon.com / Nebula photos. Till next time this has been Nico Carver, Nebula photos, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, next time this has been Nico Carver, Nebula photos, Christmas.