Never mind the quality feel the width descibes this refractor. For the price delivered of just over £200 in the uk it is a remarkable telescope for the money. I have had an 80 mm orion refractor for some years and that took the best astrophoto I have ever taken of the M31 galaxy using the canon eos350d. I did not expect much on receiving it but was pleasantly surprised by the build quality that was as good as if not better than my takahashi refractor costing 12 times as much in price. Obviously the lens quality will not be the same but for wide field astrophotography with the canon eos350d it turned out to be excellent. It will never be a planetary refractor but at least the objective was not fashioned by a neanderthal flint knapping.It was bought to mount onto my lx200 as it is very light in construction so that the lx200 drive can transport it easily without straining the drive motors. The takahashi refractor pushes the lx200 to its limits and I have not found it practical to mount anything other than refractors. Below are some of the images starting to come off it this winter 2007 , as I get more I will put them on.

This is a very wide field image with M29 at the bottom. It comprises two images made out of stacks of 4 minute exposures stitched together to make one image. This is one of the messier objects that must have been designated as cometary due to its placement in this nebula.

NGC7000 is one of my favourite objects at this time of year. This is a stack of four minute exposures again. Simple maximal filtering was done on it to lower the background noise using my own software after stacking.

This is a very wide field image of the Veil Nebula. It has been made out of nine exposures making three pictures that have been assembled together with Autostitch a shareware program on the web. The gap on the bottom left is due to the fact that I needed four pictures. I simply ran out of sky as the clouds came in. However it is still a reasonable picture. It was stacked ,brightness and contrast boosted, a maximal filter was then put over it to take out the noise build up from the contrast adjustment then more brightness and contrast adjustment applied again to bring out the nebula..Note the local light pollution from backwash from my neighbours outside security light, though this is what my site is about,imaging from a light polluted area.The whole image as a download is here.. as it is not easy to display these on a web site at full size.

The field of view for M42 is wide and it makes a good representation of that with the Canon using 5 X 2 minute exposures...

The Flame nebula is more difficult and needs 4 minute exposures but the rendition is still very good..I used a pass from the maximal filter in my own software to remove the noise from this exposure.One of these days I am going to rebuild my filter assembly to get rid of the flare problems about bright stars,but I think that I would have trouble finding one as good as this thirty year old filter these days.