First Light for the Hyperstar - Finally :-)

Well I finally spent a few hours and got my Hyperstar focal reducer mounted onto my Edge C11HD telescope.  If you're familiar with camera exposures and f-stops and such, then what this does is changes my telescope's native f/10 ratio into an f/2.  This results in two things: a much wider field of view (from 2800mm focal length - ie SUPER telephoto - to a much shorter 560mm) and a much shorter exposure for a given scene (from say 12.5 minutes down to 30 seconds - a factor of 25!)  Here's a picture of my Mallincam Xtreme astro-vieo camera mounted on the Hyperstar...

If you look at some of the other photos of my scope / observatory, you'll notice the camera was in the back. With the Hyperstar the front secondary mirror is removed and the Hyperstar is screwed onto the front corrector plate.  The whole change takes about 5 minutes (that is after you spend a couple hours rerouting cables and balancing the scopes on the mount ;-).  Its like having two very different telescopes in one; one with high magnification for planetary work and small deep-space objects and one with a wide field of view for the larger deep-space objects like the Veil and Orion Nebulae and the Andromeda Galaxy.  I'll be using it initially with the Mallincam, but hope to soon migrate over to my QHY-8 CCD.  Stay tuned for some (hopefully!) very cool images ;-)  

Peace & blessings,  Donn...