Have been using a William Optics GT71 refractor since 2017. Nice scope, but despite tweaking the flattener / reducer and post processing the heck out of the subframes, I never was amazed by the crispness of the stars nor the flatness across the whole frame. I’d seen images posted on astrobin and elsewhere from newer astrograph scopes, but put off upgrading, since the gurus in the various astrophotography forums seemed to provide amazing images from 50-90mm WO scopes, albeit with long integration times, and narrow band filters.
Finally got an Askar 500mm though. Sheesh, what was I waiting for? The Trifid and Lagoon below were from last night, no filters, with only 22 minutes of integration time plus 3 dark frames. Clouds showed up preventing longer exposure time. Results were simply stacked in ZWO’s ASIDarkStack in a minute, then slightly tweaked in dev.macgyver’s Photo Editor app on Android. And with just that alone, they already look better than any of my GT71 shots that I spend hours massaging in Siril and Gimp.
Should have just bought an astrograph sooner. Can’t wait to see what longer integration times and better guiding brings…
The new version (currently in Beta) of BlurXTerminator by Russel Croman is going to fix many of your previous issues. He’s training it on tilt, coma and focus issues and it’s exicting that in true Google style software is going to be able to assist with hardware issues soon.
Saying that, in terms of bang for buck absolutely cannot fault the Askar! I had a Sharpstar 94 for years and only just sold it. They are great scopes.
Lovely images :)