Seestar for Planetary with Tiny Telescope Solid SCTs

jon

Dear ZWO team,

Knowing how innovation drives your company, I was wondering if you would be exploring new paths for longer focal lengths while maintaining portability and simplicity.

There is this new solid mini Schmidt Cassegrains telescopes built on a single piece of Silica, BK7, or potentially even plastics, that seem to be a « tiny » revolution in optics. This coupled with your cameras and software would be just amazing.

Seems they already use your cameras in their prototypes.

Actually, it is not necessarily only for longer focal lengths.

The optics advantages seem countless compared to any sort of tubes, contrast seems to be better than refractors at comparable aperture, despite the central obstruction, if I get it well.

And they are looking towards volume production.

https://youtu.be/OWfiQys4NMs?si=bJEFO-rn3ICjG50q

https://www.tinytelescope.com/home/products/

8EFbB431

I don't think that "planetary" and "portability" are compatible. You need a larger aperture for proper planetary imaging. The bigger the aperture- the more light you can collect. Small aperture + long focal length = dark image + insufficient details

jon

8EFbB431

That’s the whole point of those Solid SCTs.

You can have a 120mm aperture f/5 with a 600mm focal length measuring only 72mm in physical length.

So the scope is a piece of glass of 120mm x 72mm weighting about 1.80 Kg, not more than a S50 (of course with all ancillaries).

Coupled with a 2.9 micron pixel size, drizzled x2 gives you a sampling of 0.5 arcsec per pixel (which is nothing exceptional, but still >2.39x a Seestar S50 also drizzled, and all nights without thermic problems, collimation or scattering), whereas a celestron C6 or C8 can vary most nights, being far from diffraction limit. So a great contrast in principle in most nights.

Here is a paper about it and evolution of manufacturing:

https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/13699/136991E/Solid-space-telescope-design-manufacturing-performance-and-applications/10.1117/12.3075214.full

However they seem to be extremely difficult to manufacture because of optics shapes and tolerances, but China is capable of industrial miracles…