Moving away from Quark - 60 and 80mm options?

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BGazing
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Moving away from Quark - 60 and 80mm options?

Post by BGazing »

I have been lurking unregistered on this forum ever since I have decided to scratch my H-alpha itch. Needless to say, read hundreds of posts before I decided to splash on a Quark. Made sense because I have a 100mm Tak and a 71mm Borg. Although there were some hiccups (fingerprint on etalon which I have cleaned sucessfully with Baader fluid) and fiddling with the best setting (eventually went to -5), I was blown away even during a solar minimum. It did help that on the first couple of days I had a massive eruptive prominence on display...During COVID lockdown we had perfect skies and I was literally doing an hour of H-alpha every day. Quark was super expensive (or so I thought), but it was worth it...
Which brings me to my current itch, and that is a dedicated solar scope.
Aside from working with Quark in two telescopes, I have learned its drawbacks firsthand. Borg gets to only f/24, so suboptimal contrast, Tak starts at 77x in a strawlike fashion and gets to a better plossl experience only at 95x, which is sometimes too much. Prominences are awesome when the seeing supports but the surface detail I have to tease out. I love binos, tried them but they vignette in Tak and in Borg they are better but I have to stop it down to get to f/27, where it operates at 62mm. Binos do not feel comfortable because the lever of Quark and MB is so long.
So I have been thinking about parting with a significanly more of my hard earned money to get myself something nice that does not require heating and easily shifts into red and blue. In other words, probably Lunt. Another option is fitting my Borg with SolarScope DS in 70mm but that email is yet to be answered.
As for Lunt, it is either 60mm DS or 80mm SS which I would later upgrade to DS. European vendors seem depleted and there are waiting times, but my questions are primarily about user's experience with the two apertures in Lunt scopes, in particular:
- is 60mm DS usable for binoviewing? What is the upper magnitude limit? Same for 80mm SS.
- How does new 80mm doublestack, does that reflection-killing filter work?
- is 60mm DSed with one front filter?
- How much does a 60mmDS weigh (tutto completo) and how much is it for 80mm SS and DS (I have learned not to trust websites)?
- is B1800 a must for 80mm and binoviewing (I use 2.6 GPC).


Lunt 80MT DS, 533/1600/462
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