The Dutch Observatory

February 16, 2011 on 9:50 pm | In Sun | Comments Off

OK, I’ve been very busy testing several Solar Scopes, so have fallen behind in posting my images.  Around Christmas I tried to work with the Lunt LS50 etalons, but had problems with my scope, so I don’t really know what they do.  The last week I looked at the following scopes:  Lunt LS35, Lunt60 with pressure tuning,  and the SolarMax40.  The first images of the SolarMax were terrible.  It looked they would not come in focus.  It turned out that the blocking filter was wrong.  Changing this to a B10 changed the playing field.  The Lunt LS35 turned out great for the money.  Its sweet spot was a little bit out of the center, but I got great images with it, and I would have bought this scope if we had not detected the wrong blocking filter with the SolarMax.  For the price/performance of  the LS35 you cannot beat this deal.  However, once the correct blocking filter was installed on the SolarMax, this scope became my favorite, simply because I had the opportunity to buy it used.  If I had to pay the new price, my choice would have been the LS35!  Here a number of the images made on the 16th.