The Astro-Tech AT80EDT - A Fine Triplet Apo Refractor at an Attractive Price!

hello and welcome back to the channel today we're taking a look at an astrotech at80 EDT it's an 80 mm F6 apochromatic triplet Ed refractor now I've been getting a lot of requests to review this thing so let's take a look and see how it performs okay so we have a nice lockable aluminum FL case here with more telescope manufacturers would just give us that as standard and Mike the guy who bought this said the worst part about this telescope is the foam is very tight and it is but let me tell you something if tight foam is the worst thing you can find to say about a telescope that's probably good news especially coming from a guy like Mike he is our resident refractor lover now I don't know how much of this is coming across on camera but this thing is just gorgeous everybody who has come in here has remarked about this this is a really nice powdercoated finish here fit and finish just really outstanding comes with a set of rings and the plate and there's a little bushing on the knob to make sure that you you don't go metal on metal a nice touch also these are very well machined holes drilled on the top if you want to put a finder or an auto guider or whatever you like on the top we get sliding do Shield do cap and lens with nice deep dark Coatings 80 mm F6 it is a triplet and there are at least two baffles that I can see down there you also get a two-speed focuser it is graded here fine focus is quite nice and you also get and this may not be obvious this actually is a rotating focuser may not notice that at first couple of different philosophies on rotating focusers each has their fans some of them just like what happens after the visual back to rotate others like the astrophysics stow away which has a feather touch on it the entire visual back rotates some people like that I actually kind of like this a little bit better because if the whole visual back rotates the focuser rotates and if the finder shoe is on here that rotates as well and sometimes you have trouble finding things in the dark so really it's it's checking off all the boxes I mean you're getting a lot for your money many manufacturers will just give you an optical tube at this price but you're getting almost everything you need to get started the Rings the plate this two-speed Focus Fus ER is very often an option with an expensive telescope as is the rotating part of the focuser try pricing the camera angle adjuster on a Takahashi you know and uh and of course you get the case so uh really you're getting a lot for your money and you can almost get going right here but if you're a beginner you do want to know that you're going to have to supply the rest of this that is the finder itself the diagonal any eye pieces you want to use and of course the all important mount so you know I've had this discussion with people before you can almost tell country of origin just by looking at the telescope in other words each Nation seems to have its own design aesthetic look at enough telescopes you can probably guess where the thing was made so at the top here we have Takahashi sky90 made in Japan astrophysics staway t85 made in USA William Optics megr 90 Taiwan and the astrotech made in China now if you notice the Americans and the Japanese seem to be the least interested in impressing you those are actually quite plain looking the Chinese scope is the opposite it wants you to notice it now I don't have a Russian telescope here but if I did trust me those things are instantly recognizable even from a distance the optical tube weighs 6 and2 lbs by itself fully loaded here with the Rings the plate the finder the diagonal inch and 1/ qu adapter and an 18.2 mm Delite eyepiece it weighs just over 8 lb starting to get up there a little bit but still an easy load for a midsize Mount like the Celestron AVX now with 480 mm of focal length to work with it is an ideal telescope for low power wide field sweeping of the Milky Way and even if you don't know what you're doing just pointing it up and sweeping around can be a lot of fun if you want to look at the planets and you are going to want to with a good refractor you're going to need more power unfortunately with only 480 mm of focal length to work with we do have to wind up using one of these and my favorite the Tel 2.5x Power Mate now longtime viewers of this channel know I am constantly cautioning beginners against indiscriminate use of the barow but again with such a small focal length we've got to resort to these things to extend it and raise the magnification now on Jupiter I found that the 2.5x Power Mate in combination with the 11 mm nagler proved to be a very good combination for viewing most of the time I did have one exceptional night of viewing where I was able to use the 7 mm nagler as opposed to the 11 with the 2.5x Power Mate at 170 power you need a good night around here to be able to use that and I don't even think I would go much higher than that even under ideal circumstances but again with a really good night see lots of cloud bands see the red spot coming across and also watching Shadow transits that's a lot of fun the little moons of Jupiter cast black dots across the surface of the planet you can sort of watch those move along as the evening goes by so you know one evening I was out here looking all by myself and a car pulled up behind me people piled out entire family came out and said what are you doing is there anything special going on tonight they always ask that don't they they always want to know if there's something special going on and I said no I'm just kind of goofing off and I must have spent the next hour showing them things up in the night sky including Jupiter and all of these deep Sky objects they had a great time thanked me left and I never even got their names so I do want to point out that it is winter time and you only have 80 mm of aperture here and it's easy to convince yourself in a time like this that 80 mm is enough but I do want to point out that there are so many big bright objects out here in the wintertime you can sort of fool yourself into thinking well I don't need anything more than 80 mm but if we were doing this review in April where there's nothing to look at but lots of dim galaxies yeah you might have a slightly different opinion and of course I wound up taking some images through this thing here is a picture of my image ing rig you've seen much of this stuff before that's the hutch modded EOS 5D Mark II the teleview field flattener esig STI autoguider the AVX Mount and a old cheap laptop running phd2 images were processed in pix Insight okay so when you see these reviews of mine and I'm showing you Astro photos as a very general rule of thumb if you see me showing lots of images which is what I'm doing right here it's usually a good sign it's a sign that the telescope was easy to work with and not all of them are in fact when I get a new telescope very often the first one or two or sometimes even three evenings are sacrificial to me it just takes a while to get used to the new system but this one right off the bat no problem I got images right away and I was satisfied with the quality of them wow I really like that horse nebula but anyway as a very general rule of thumb the more images you see the easier the telescope is to work with here's an image of IC 405 and you can just start to see the top of IC 410 those are both in Orga and here's an image of IC 410 by itself okay so again I do get lots of questions about this model and it's largely from upgraders that is people who have something like an Orion e d80 or the smaller astrotech at72 or its clones is this better yes it's better it's better optically especially it's better optically than that at72 I haven't been all that impressed with the Optics on those that I've seen but that's okay given the price that they sell those things for I don't really know that we can complain but optically it's better and mean mechanically it's better much more so than the Orion ed80 class of telescope now is it worth it that's not the kind of thing that I can tell you that's an individual decision but I can tell you it is better than those Scopes and it should be based on the amount of money that they sell these things for so other than that I not really finding much to say here I mean for the price they sell this thing for it wasn't that long ago no way could you get this kind of performance for that kind of money the only thing I might be able to say is I haven't seen a lot of these I hope they're all like this one I've owned a lot of astrotech telescopes and I've seen lots of them the quality control seems to be pretty good so there you have it a look at the astrotech at80 EDT apochromatic refractor in an 80mm aperture I hope this review has helped you to decide if this telescope is right for you thanks for watching and I'll see you soon

Channel: Ed Ting

Views: 12,111

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Id: MzqOa0cLZds

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 16 2024