William Optics REDCAT 61 (FIRST LOOK!)

this is the William Optics Redcat 61. it's small It's mighty and it's redder than ever this is the third variation of the original red cat petsville astrograph but this one has a huge difference can you tell what it is tonight I'll capture a beautiful deep Sky object using the new William Optics Redcat 61 and do my best to cover absolutely everything you could possibly want to know about this little telescope before buying it astrophotographers this is our month to shine [Music] thank you as always I'm not being compensated for a positive review of this telescope it's a play with it and let us know what you think kind of a deal the package William sent me included the red tube Rings a love it or hate it cat saddle and a 30 millimeter uniguide guide scope in terms of overall presentation the William Optics stuff is always really slick always a padded carry bag with foam inserts and this time a little letter with a sticker on it that I'm not sure what it is so it's the two-year product warranty and cat stickers if you haven't noticed there's a big change to this cat one that I think people who may have ignored the first two versions will take notice the original helical focuser is gone and it now uses the new patented internal Focus design you know what that means you can now use a more traditional autofocuser with this Redcat 61 something like the popular z-w-o-e-aaf the internal Focus design is also available on the new William Optics gt81 and it seems like William realizes he has a winner with this focuser design okay more about the focuser in a minute we need to get to the Core specs of this telescope this refractor has a focal length of 300 millimeters and a focal ratio of f 4.9 this means that the Redcat 61 is best used for wide field nebulae projects and only the largest galaxies the Moon is also in play but planets are just too small for this scope like the red cats that came before it this one also uses FPL 53 glass in A Pet's full lens design it also includes one of the easiest best most simplest ideas ever the built-in Batten off mask you can easily attach your DSLR or mirrorless camera or in my case a dedicated astronomy camera to the adapter on the back in and enjoy a 46 millimeter image Circle this telescope weighs about seven pounds and you can tack on another three or four pounds for your camera gear so that places the Redcat 61 in the small equatorial Mount category or even a well-balanced star tracker as you can see it's red overload here on the zwo am5 some might say a little too Red I wonder what color astrophotography gear will be in 10 years unlike when the original William Optics redcap 50 one came out in 2019 there are a lot of other options to consider at this focal length with the introduction of the internal Focus design with the 61 model it seems like William Optics is moving away from the is it a lens is it a telescope idea this one is definitely an astrophotography specific pets full apochromatic refractor in terms of mounting a go-to equatorial mount with a payload capacity of 20 to 30 pounds is more than enough for the Redcat 61. I'm sure the am5 will be a popular choice for anyone that plans on traveling with this telescope sticking with the lightweight Motif you can see the tiny 30 millimeter guide scope I have mounted to the cat saddle you could pick up an ASI 120 mm mini like the one I'm using here and a 30 millimeter guide scope for about 250 dollars all in you now have a full auto guiding system and a very capable planetary camera that you can use for lunar Imaging as well I'm a big fan of ultra portable setups but make no mistake a setup like this is best for wide field images if you want to capture something deeper you'll need a lot more focal length speaking of shooting wide to all the people that accuse me of shooting the same targets over and over again okay nobody says this but I know you're thinking it I am happy to inform you that tonight I'm going after something a little more obscure just north of the star Saturn in the constellation cygnus lies a collection of sinewy ribbons of hydrogen gas and a fascinating object known as the propeller nebula I bet most of you have never gone after this target before after over 10 years of shooting the night sky I hadn't I will be shooting in narrow band tonight due to that bright 82 illuminated Moon it is absolutely perfect out here right now nights like this don't come along very often [Music] okay I'm losing light here it's time to Polar align the telescope Mount and get this baby rigged up for a night of astrophotography [Music] okay it's almost time to get polar aligned and start shooting the propeller nebula as my test subject but I wanted to cover the exact configuration I'm using here for those that are interested once again I'm using the ASI air plus to control the Imaging session and to run the camera the camera is an ASI 2600 mm Pro with an electronic filter wheel in front with this camera and the Redcat 61 I get an image scale of 2.5 Arc seconds per pixel this may seem a little crispy for some or boxy or sharp whatever you want to call it don't obsess over image scale a lot of these rules don't seem to matter very much after you've applied techniques like blur exterminator and post-processing okay time to start shooting my object wish me luck [Music] thank you okay I'm in Adobe Photoshop now and we're taking a look at the data I shot last night this is a combination of the narrow band images I took in hydrogen sulfur and oxygen if we look at the channels you can see the individual Stacks this is the red so this is the sulfur the green the hydrogen and the blue the oxygen so just some minimal balancing here to get things kind of evened out this is not the final image by any means but I wanted to keep it in a pretty raw state so you could actually inspect the quality of these images so the green is always going to be the best in the the Hubble palette that's the hydrogen it's the strongest signal things look really good here and again this is an aps-c sized sensor a monochrome camera the stars look good across the field nice and flat the blue was by far the weakest signal O3 on a night with the bright moon uh so it looks the worst and I I feel like I let the scope kind of fall out of focus over time I didn't monitor it and uh I'm not using an auto focuser so not the sharpest stars in the world uh the red again everything looks fine no no issues as far as I can see in terms of optical quality of the Redcat 61 but before we do the final reveal at the end of the video Let's cover the final verdict for the Redcat 61 on my first light okay some final thoughts on my first light with the William Optics Redcat 61 wifd first the good this is a premium Astro graph high-end Optics no need for a field flatten or field corrector it has a huge image Circle a nice Rotator all the things you've come to expect on a cat I think the internal Focus design was a good call now you can use a Standard Auto focuser and a lot of people had issues with that helical Focus there it was just a different design and not ideal for some people the wifd design means that you're not extending that Imaging train as you focus in and out also which is kind of cool for people that are tired of dealing with a extra long Imaging train based on the diagram I saw on William's website it looks like it helps with vignetting as well so that's a bonus as for the bad there's really not a whole lot to mention the one issue I did have was that the focuser knob the course focusing knob is so huge that it would run into the mounting plate on the am5 so I had to move the telescope up so it wasn't running into that plate at first I didn't realize why I couldn't focus it was locked in but it was just running into that plate something to keep in mind the other thing is the cost it looks like it's listed at about 1600 US Dollars which is a lot of money for a 61 millimeter telescope although you save the cost of a dedicated field flattener which could be upwards of four hundred dollars you also get the bag the cat saddle and the built-in Batten off mask so there's added value there I think there's a huge market for this telescope and it has the potential of outselling the original Red Cap 51 which is really saying something there's definitely a Goldilocks vibe to the 61. the 51 was impressive and small the 71 had more reach but continued with that helical focuser but this one seems to get everything right well that's all I have for now so until next time keep shooting keep sharing and clear skies [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: AstroBackyard

Views: 105,750

Keywords: william optics redcat 61, redcat 61, redcat 61 review, astrophotography, astrophotography telescope, RedCat 61 WIFD, WIFD, astrobackyard

Id: tB_O4QZSWQY

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2023