mak tele-lenses for astrophotography

www.telescope-service.com/maksutovs/MTO/MTO.html
Anyone here have any experience of using these?

I've used a 500mm f8 for photographing a total solar eclipse. It gave pretty good results. I've never used it for anything else however (like deep sky).

Good luck,

Daniel

www.telescope-service.com/maksutovs/MTO/MTO.html
Anyone here have any experience of using these?

Not this model but I do own a Quantaray 500 mm F8 Maksutov lens. Used with a high quality Tokina doubler and Baader filter, it gives good solar images. I paid €125 for mine a few years ago so €198 seems good value for a 1000 mm model.

Gordon

An interesting lens, a F10, the price seems very good given the type and size, might be a nice little gem.

An interesting lens, a F10, the price seems very good given the type and size, might be a nice little gem.

I'm thinking the same. It would be nice and compact for atop my LX90 and would be useful for autoguiding along with astrophotography. As you said, the price seems very reasonable and Russian optics do have a good reputation.

It looks like this guy had good results even with an F8 mirror lens:
www.fourmilab.ch/images/eclipse_2001/gallery.html

For astrophotography you might want to consider a slightly faster sharper (and necessarily longer) non-mirror lens. The huge central obstruction and high F number of mirro lenses may mean diffraction galore! My father had a cheap (soligar? tameron?) 400mm F6.3 non-mirror lens. I was able to kludge together an eyepiece adapter with a plastic cup and see the (very small) rings of saturn so the optics were decent. You might be surprised at how good fixed focal length SLR lenses can be after we've grown acustomed to the compromised optics of zoom lenses.

I've been using a celestron F 5.6 500mm maksutov mirror lens. Even this is a bit too slow for unguided astrophotography of anything but the moon and properly filtered (or totally eclipsed Sun. If I don't sell it, I'm still debating whether to take it or my new ETX-70 (xmas present) for the eclipse. In a side by side comparison, the ETX-70 seems a slightly sharper but the Celestron is more practical as a camera lens.