Wild Experiments with the Acuter Maksy 60

The massive 2-inch Tele Vue 55mm Plossl eyepiece weighed more and was almost bigger than the entire Acuter 60mm Maksutov telescope!

FROM F/12.5 TO F/6.25
Wild Experiments with the Acuter Maksy 60
I put a 2" barrel diameter Televue 55mm Plossl with a 50 degree FOV on the minuscule maksutov telescope making it f/6.25 instead of f/12.5. You can only guess what happened next!

The 55m 2" ocular from Televue is massive. It's heavier than the entire telescope and tried to topple the scope when using the small table top tripod. The tripod had to be cinched very tight with both adjustment screws and I had to be vigilant to keep it from tipping over.

Above: Holding the telescope and holding the camera pressed to the eyepiece and then touching the screen to take the photo was a challenge. Without spending any time on focusing, the hand held mobile phone captured this view at 14.75x and F/6.25 instead of F/12.5.

Left: to compare to the 55mm focal length eyepiece, a gold line 23mm 62 FOV aspheric was used from Svbony. Visually the EP provided an exceptional view. Through the camera, the round circle containing the image was small.

To set up this massive EP, a 2-inch to 1.25" adapter was used which easily fit into the 1.25" 90-degree diagonal. The EP view was fantastic, smaller, brighter but had one odd anomaly - the camera could not get close enough and mainly showed a small round circle with the object of interest inside. Note - weather conditions were increasingly terrible, with fog and haze moving in. Photos are low contrast due to fog, haze and heavy air pollution.

At this time, I never had the chance to try the camera's zoom which might have filled the FOV. I was, however, able to place my eye properly to see the objects correctly with the full FOV. Eye relief is not very much with this ocular and telescope combination. At the lower left and right edges, the prism cut off a small section of view. However, things changed with the 23mm ocular and the camera was zoomed in a small amount. See photo at left.