REVIEW of the STELLARVUE SVX 90T REFRACTOR TELESCOPE
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ส.ค. 2024
- Stellarvue is a telescope company ins Auburn, California that makes premium refractors. They configure the lenses right in their shop in Auburn and guarantee them to have the highest quality optics. I had a chance to use their popular SVX 90mm refractor for a few months and this is my review of the telescope.
My goodness.
One of the most enjoyable and informative telescope reviews ever.
Thank you !
Thanks! I appreciate it.
I have one on order, can't wait
Congratulations. You will love it!
Great !!! I have had a Stellarvue 80A for many years and it is still one of my most used telescopes. With good eyepieces you should be able to see good detail with that Telescope.
Great review. I want a Stellarvue and have been window shopping the 102mm's. I currently have a 81mm Vixen which I love. I will give the 90mm more consideration.
I have the 102 Stellarvue also. It is a doublet but performs like a triplet. Both are great telescopes.
Nice review, Tsula! I looked seriously at Stellarvue when I was in the market for an astrophotography refractor, but the price (after getting the flattener or flattener/reducer plus all the other accessories) was just too much so I opted for my Askar 107PHQ Petzval (quad) refractor. I'm very happy with it. But the specs and the quality of the Stellarvue scopes seem phenomenal and your review seems to back that up. Ah, maybe some day... Thanks for another great review!
Thanks, Greg. I'm sure your Askar 107 will perform just fine but boy does Stellarvue make a mighty fine telescope.
@@tsulasbigadventures Rather than leave this comment over at your video on visual mounts (where we talked about Stellarvue scopes), I thought it would leave it here since I didn't think I'd interfere with any 'active' commenting. Anyway, I received my Chinese f/5.6 refractor after waiting two months for it, and I looked inside and there was paint peeling off the first lens retaining ring I could see. Wha? Never seen such a thing with a new scope! Also, the hard case was cracked and deformed on the bottom. Also, I did a brief star test and many of the stars looked like a filled in Star of David - LITERALLY! Some of them had little notches on the sides as well. Good grief. Needless to say, I'm sending it back and I'm done with mass-produced scopes. (I think I've related some of the problems I've had in the past.) After all that, I ordered an SVX90T! I know it's not going to have the QC issues that the other mass-produced scopes have, and as I mentioned in my comments to your 'mounts' video, I am very confident of their quality -- and their quality control. With the reducer, I can get the speed down to f/4.8 and with the increase in quality over what I've been using, that should be great. I must say, though, after I sent the first one back, I am really very happy with my Askar 107PHQ. I must have gotten very lucky in the mass-produced telescope lottery with that second one. Very excited to look through my first, very own, premium refractor!! I'll let you know what I think of the SVX90T.
Hi Tsula
Yes Vic Maris is making fantastic dream scopes. He's one of the best télescope maker all over the world. So congrats. I hope you'll do excellent observations and DSOs images with it.
Greetings from France.
I have only heard good things about Stellarvue.
Merci and bonjour! If my friend, Katie, will let me hang onto it for a while I sure plan to get some astrophotos with it and some more observing.
At the end of 2022 I bought the imaging version and it was in the first batch of them that came out. I could not be happier. I just started imaging and I use a ZWO ASI533MC pro camera and the, clarity/sharpness is phenomenal. It is worth every penny to have a scope of this quality that is this portable and I know it will last me the rest of my life. It fits in carryon if you plan to travel with it. Everything about it is perfect.
I love it. I finally tried it out with a Mirrorless camera and a Televue Focal reducer and even though this is not the imaging version it worked perfectly. It was a little tight fitting everything and I can see how the riser would really help but I was able to get it to work using a replacement dovetail from William Optics.
I love refractor too. I recently got a Astro-Tech 125EDL. It has a .95 Strehl ratio. Very nice performer. I'm gonna get that Stellarvue mount. I've been using the Manfrotto 612 Nitrotech with it but I want to use it with my binos only.
Me too. I don't care too much for AP.
I looked up your telescope on Astrotech's website. It looks like a nice telescope. I thought you told me a long time ago that you got that M00C2 mount already. It's a very smooth mount.
@@tsulasbigadventures The new one? I've used the old one. I want to get the new one, the M002C Mount. It supports more weight.
There's another mount I'd like to get called Mount Altazimuth SB. Being sold on Astromart only. You can mount 2 scopes on it. Less than the Stellarvue mount.
0.95 strehl is not particularly high. There's a lot of refractors with 0.98-0.99 strehl costing less than the Stellarvue.
@@Astronurd I have an Astro-Physics Starfire 130mm refractor with higher Strehl. I don't hardly see any difference between the two.
Hey Tsula, another great review! Thanks again for your helpful recommendations.
Thank you, Elray!
Great high content review. Thx.
Thank you!
I’m saving up for the SVX102T right now. Hoping to have it before March
Wonderful telescope.
@@tsulasbigadventuresgoing to pair it with an IMX294 for some good deep space imaging
Another great review! Very well done. I was wondering what the two larger mounts you using in the night section from time ~10:44 to ~15:23 are?
Thank you! I was using a Skywatcher EQ6R Pro and an Orion Sirius EQ-G.
Just got mine love it!
Congratulations! It's a great telescope.
Enjoyed the review. Thanks.
Thank you!
Great channel here, i've subscribed. I'm just a visual observer too. YES seeing conditions is everything. I can't get out at the moment and I mainly observe the moon through GLASS! in window. I stop my refractors down to 50 & 40mm to tighten up the views...it works! Looking forward to watching your videos. P.S. You can split Izar at 60mm.
Thank you! I think the seeing would have to be excellent in order to split Izar with a 60mm. I had a hard time splitting it with an 80mm refractor but admittedly the seeing was not great. PS: Why do you look through the window?
@@tsulasbigadventures It's a bit strange but smaller apertures can cut through poor seeing conditions, you can try this for yourself by putting a cardbord mask in the dew shield of your scopes with a 60mm hole in it. I have a touch of sciatica in my back and I don't have a backyard so at the moment I'm limited to indoor viewing. I used to take my scopes to do outreach but those days are gone. Maybe a could do that again in future if I buy a TV60, I love small scopes.
@@BuildonRock OK I will experiment with this idea. Last night I rolled out the 12” SCT and I as ready to observe and it started raining out of nowhere As soon as I hustled her back into the garage it stopped. So I just observed instead from the deck with the little 90mm refractor and I was happy as a clam.
@@tsulasbigadventures Good to hear you got some time in with your *little* 90mm, my biggest scope is 80mm. Thick cloud here in northern England...and raining!
Great video Tsula! I was just thinking. What Galileo would say looking through that scope? Clear skys !!!
Thanks, Eric. He would probably have the same reaction I had the first time I saw the Great Orion Nebula through a telescope-- I nearly fainted.
Katy might consider getting the handle for the mount. It’s nice.
I haven't returned it to her yet. So, I will look into that. A handle would really help.
@@tsulasbigadventures I think it can sometimes interfere with your tripod legs when looking near zenith, but otherwise it’s a nice way to move the scope around instead of grabbing the focuser or diagonal area.
Excellent video. The Orion 115 mm triplet used FPL51 glass which is of course not as good as FPL53. Wan't the Orion 115 mm image a lot brighter than the one of the Stellarvue 90 mm ?
Thank you! According to Vic Maris who makes Stellarvue telescopes, there really is no difference between FPL 51 and FPL 53 and it's really in the production of the glass. Orion mass produces most of their refractors in China while Stellarvue hand makes their refractors in Auburn, CA. Anyway, the image would be brighter in a larger aperture telescope. So, it would be brighter in the 115mm telescope but since I was looking at double stars it was more about resolving power.
Nice video - it reminds me of drooling (to use your word) over telescopes during my idle hours at work. I was particularly fascinated by the new 3" wide-field eyepieces.
All of that technical talk - 🙂 - reminded me of a straightforward explanation (which I read amid instructions how to build a DIY interferometer) why one can't infinitely magnify the image of an objective. One might as well infinitely magnify a picture in a magazine. Soon one would magnify the ink dots instead of any meaningful detail. Similarly, one eventually ends by magnifying the electromagnetic crests in an optical image.
Speaking of big eyepieces, this is funny - the video itself is nothing at all, but take a look at its thumbnail (which you can see by disabling auto-play, if you have it enabled):
th-cam.com/video/ugTqTsDnbGY/w-d-xo.html (The Smallest Astronomical Telescope and the Largest Commercial Eyepiece)