RedCat61 WIFD Review - Finally no more helical focuser!

hello everybody uh welcome back to the channel before we get into it I have to say if you see me swatting at my face is because there's a million tiny gnats right now out in Utah and it's uh they're getting all up in my business so a couple weeks ago you may notice I posted a review of a pretty weird interesting telescope design a 81 millimeter refractor that had a strange internal focusing mechanism just like a camera lens does now I have it's a little brother here for a review this is the William Optics Redcat 61 pets full OTA wifd a whole lot of numbers a whole lot of acronyms this is a full frame designed refractor telescope which behaves equally like a camera lens due to its internal focusing mechanism that we're going to be running tonight with my little zwo camera out in Kanab Utah some of the darkest guys in America and I'm at a nice Airbnb so it's going to be hopefully a really nice experience if it doesn't get too windy tonight and if the gnats will go away there's a lot of gnats out here yeah this is like a classical evolution of the red cat telescope but instead of having the helical focuser it's got the cool new internal focusing mechanism which I'm a big fan of because honestly the only reason I never got a red cat is because I don't like helical focusers unless it's for 135 in which case it's the greatest Optical element ever made and I'll deal with it for that but with the telescope I wasn't really ever attracted to helical focusers but now the red cat doesn't have one it's got a normal style focuser so it'll be really nice uh to see how this little guy does optically I've got the 183 on the back of it so even though this thing has a short focal length of like 330 millimeters it's actually going to have a ton of resolution around like an arc second per pixel with these tiny little pixels so it's pretty much the perfect uh combination for doing some images and I'm probably going to be shooting the Lagoon and tri-fit just keeping it simple and we'll shoot something nice and bright in one night and hopefully get a pretty awesome result to uh show you guys anyways we're all set up we just have to wait until dark now so I'm gonna give you some b-roll shots of the scope maybe talk about a little bit and then we will cut Until Dark time uh when we'll start taking our photos all right before we get into the rest of the video uh my financial disclosure for these products is no one has paid me anything for any of this stuff uh William Optics sent me the scope for review and Gina sent me the eagle for review everything else I had to pay for with my old hard-earned money in light of that there are affiliate links for the products in the video and if you decide to get one then I get like a tiny commission off of it which I think is fair given I spent a bunch of money in gas to get here and time to come out and film this video so if you like the telescope I get a little money for it but I don't think there's anything wrong with that in light of it I'm going to be giving you a an honest review you know I like to keep it real if I don't like something I will talk about it and you will know for sure Venus wow it looks like it's gearing up to be like a literally perfect night no wind no clouds and it's warm because it's June so this is just going to be absolutely great because I can't stand the cold I grew up in Phoenix I don't do cold I'm an absolute wimp when it comes to that but it also sounds like an ASMR video out here I don't know if you can hear all the Crickets but this really adds to the vibe and I'm actually looking forward to Star Gazing tonight I haven't seen the Milky Way in maybe two months or so so it's going to be like an absolutely Pleasant night to sit out on the porch of the Airbnb and just watch the stars but freaking stat I just wanted to maybe talk about what I'm gonna shoot why I'm gonna shoot it and uh what it is and I'm gonna have to break out my phone here because I don't know anything about space I'll tell you what I do know off the top of my head and then later Bray will give you some facts so I'm going for the Lagoon and the tri-fit nebula now I know I shoot a lot of off the cuff things but uh those things aren't suited for making a YouTube review so we're gonna do something nice and bright something that's gonna you know at least Deliver us a nice pretty photo and that is going to be the Lagoon of the trifle nebula it's one of the brightest nebula in the sky probably the brightest in the summertime sky here in the Northern Hemisphere and it's a bright star forming region in Sagittarius and with the field of view of this telescope there will be of course the tri-fit which is messy at 20 in the lagoon which is messy eight and some of the surrounding I think it's like an sh2 or an IC nebula that comes around with all of them anyways star forming regions those are caused by Young Stars being born the intense radiation from these stars as they come to life ionizes the surrounding gas through the photoelectric effect this radiation causes their electron levels to change and eject out a photon of a certain color now there's lots of different gases in space and nebulas as such can take on a whole bunch of different colors you know there's the bright pink there's a lot of you know teal colored ones oxygen three nebula there's sulfur two also deep red uh but the most prevalent of course is the hydrogen nebulae from the hydrogen Alpha emission that show up in the night sky as the Deep Red hue now this is of course because hydrogen is the most abundant element in our universe so it's going to be the most abundant narrowband gas and because you know it's so prevalent a lot of objects that show up in nature are really bright and the Lagoon and the tri-fit are no exception to this they are very very bright red and they are very easy to pick up with maybe only you know short exposure times like one night now I'm out in Kanab which it's incredibly dark here some of the darkest guys in America so that combined with the fact that we have a super bright nebula should you know give us a nice pretty image to uh see what this telescope is capable of I'm not going to shoot Flats tonight and I know that's really off character for me but I kind of want to see what the vignetting is like so I probably won't do any Flats anyways let me buy my exposure out it's getting dark man you know what they say gradually and then suddenly and it's definitely that way when it comes to how bright the night sky is anyways there's a lagoon in the trifon nebula so the trifid I think it's a bit more interesting than the Lagoon because it has a reflection nebula which is the bright blue next to it it has the emission nebula which is the great pink and it has an absorption nebula which comes in the form of the dark bands that sit over the top of the tri-fit and it's just it's just gorgeous it's really cool if you have a ton of focal length as well if you've got a big telescope it's just absolutely amazing a bit cooler and a lot easier to edit than the Lagoon the Lagoon I'm getting eaten alive the Lagoon is also cool even at higher focal lengths but it's very difficult to edit in such a way I like it more as like a wide field Target because it's just simpler to edit those of you who have done a fall in on the Lagoon will know what I mean it's a bit of a challenge anyways this telescope will have a focal length of 330 millimeters and my camera is an ASI 183 which is I think a micro four thirds format so it's actually going to be pretty close in and I didn't even check my framing we're going to be doing that on the fly so I'm not sure if it's going to fit both I think it's going to fit both but with this little package and these small pixels I should get a ton of resolution and we should actually be able to get a pretty cool looking photo now my challenge for tonight is going to be I'm not going to be able to Polar line because Polaris is behind this Airbnb and I needed a place where I could string together a bunch of extension cords to actually have AC power so I'll show you my janky setup for that it's going to be very janky but I hope the hem-27 is up to it the HDM 27 is kind of a weird mount my guiding is pretty weird on it too so we'll see how it goes uh but yeah we're just gonna chill out here and wait for dark I'm going to uh enjoy the ambience we go on the M8 so as we wait here for the uh the cover of night to come over us I just kind of feel something important to mention gear is not as important as you think it is in astrophotography yes it does play a huge role especially if you're going for more unique results but I could take any telescope out to Skies like this and produce a good photo you know what I mean there's no substitute for Dark Crystal Clear Skies let's say we put my Takahashi in the middle of London it's never going to work out right but let's say I bring out a you know 500 doublet out here to Kanab I could take some great images I think there's a huge focus of talking about the gear the gear the gear and you could probably do quite well with what you have if you just brought it somewhere with darker Skies somewhere with better seeing never underestimate the the importance of your location we are on Target right now I'm running everything off of my uh my little cell phone here through the eagle computer and I've got my camera running in stop motion mode so you can see what's going on behind me because man uh you couldn't ask for uh a better night or a better spot to be shooting photos and I actually barely managed to scoot this scope far enough back to where I could kind of pull or align it so we're actually getting not the worst guiding on the face of the Earth but it is it is dark out here and I'm about to get my first uh frame in on the on the object and we'll see what our uh rotation is like it looks like we're actually not going to be fitting uh the tri-fit nebula into this shot it is so zoomed in that wow unless I reframe alright so I eventually decided I should suck it up and use the built-in Rotator on the Redcat to actually do my rotation so here you see me fiddling around with it it was actually really quick just with looping exposures in Nina to just spin the camera over to where it had to go to fit both the tri-fit and the Lagoon into the shot didn't take me very long at all anyways after this was done I just let the camera Run for the entirety of the night and I finished up with about 93 minute exposures hey guys so I made it back from canab I loaded up all my data and I've produced a very nice finished image that I wanted to go through and share with you and we can talk about what's going on in it and what we think of the final image now this is of course the image we talked about shooting the classic Lagoon and tri-fit now I was actually really lazy with editing this uh there's no Flats there's no darks there's no bias and as such with the 183 we did have to fight a little bit of amp glow and we can see the smallest bit of evidence of this on the left but that I would just crop out for when I posted to social media and who is uh let's just zoom in here and look at the photo now I did give this very light application of blur exterminator for those curious uh nothing extreme but we can see we did manage to get quite a bit of good detail in this shot um I've done zero noise reduction a pretty light uh Passover for this whole image the technical details are I got about 30 images uh three minute exposures each for RG and B this is a a mono image but we can see uh things are looking good in the corners of this whole shot and there's not really any chromatic aberration which is really great so I mean overall this looks to me like a pretty nice result uh it's a shame I don't have a full frame camera to test this with but actually I do I have dslrs I just don't feel like using a DSLR to shoot Azure because it's not very ideal however we can see we got some really great details out of this and it's just a nice little small scope here is the uh the tri-fit you can see here why they call it the tri-fit it's got the three types of nebula I was mentioning earlier the blue the pink and the dark bands and we can also see quite a lot of nice detail in the lagoon ha emission region which is pretty awesome now in terms of focusing uh thermal stability that kind of stuff the focusing is very easy I can show you my raw frames here in the blink so that we can demonstrate the focus stability here are all my red frames let's blow this up so you guys can get a closer look at it you can see a couple tracking issues here and then with the ATM but you can see where I've refocused and towards the end so in Kanab big temperature swing there's a little bit of focus change but nothing extreme we can even see a band of air glow pass through which is pretty neat I'm sure you'll you've seen this on the time-lop so you will see it on the time lapse that uh that big air glow band held up pretty well throughout the the whole capture process and I suppose now just some final words about the build quality again the same problem with the 81 wifd with the focus lock being on the bottom of the Dove's Hill plate you can't really lock the focus knob again kind of a non-issue because there's no load on the focus so you know what's the point of having a focus lock if your focus is not going to move at all it seems kind of redundant to have it there but a little bit hard to reach for the rest of the build quality it's all really nice metal um it comes the Baton off mask a little saddle for the little guide scope thing very nice it held up very nice for The Guiding and the whole Imaging session scope's a little heavy given that it's like it's built like a tank so it might be a little heavier than you're used to expecting for a 61 millimeter refractor but I personally don't mind a little extra weight I'm using a mount that can handle it so I'm okay with the scope having a bit of a more tanky build to it so the other nice thing the Rotator itself was very nice to use I'm sure you saw in the video I had to change my rotation angle super nice to do on the Fly um didn't mess up my focus at all because it's all rigid on the back there and you're not having to actually rotate a camera inside of a nose piece or anything like that so holding Focus during rotation is really great um details were very nice I mean you can't really go wrong with this kind of a telescope the only downsides are it's a little heavy and you can't reach the focus block but other than that it was really nice so I hope you guys enjoyed the video I hope you enjoy the final image and I will catch you all in the next one

Channel: Bray Falls

Views: 8,065

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Id: s6zrp2lhpKA

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2023