 Today's video is sponsored by Squarespace. This is the new Ascar FRA 300 Pro. The FRA in the title of this telescope stands for Flat Field Refractive Astrograph. And for anyone that hasn't heard that term astrograph, it means a telescope specifically designed for astrophotography rather than for visual use like with an eyepiece. Now we can usually adapt a visual telescope into one more fitting for astrophotography by adding on a field corrector, like a field flabner if it's a refractor or a coma corrector if it's a reflector. But if you're designing a telescope from scratch specifically for astrophotography, then it totally makes more sense to design these flat-fielding correcting glass elements right into the design of the telescope, which is why this is a quintuplet, meaning there's five pieces of glass inside the tube here, which of course makes this telescope fairly heavy for its size. But the idea is that we won't need to buy anything additional with this telescope to get a flat, well-corrected field for astrophotography. And for that reason, and also because they're more of a specialty product, astrographs are typically very expensive. But this one, the Ascar FRA 300 Pro is very competitively priced at just 949 US dollars. So I thought it'd be interesting to see how it performs. And in this review, I'll be putting this telescope through its paces and seeing how it stacks up with another popular small telescope I have here. This is the William Optics Redcat 51. Hi everyone, this is Nico Carver and this is a review. So first, some disclaimers. Both the Ascar FRA 300 and this Redcat 51 were sent to me free of charge for the purpose of video reviews. The Redcat 51 from W.O. Boyz, which is the US online store for Williams Optics telescopes. And the Ascar from Ascar directly, but with assistance from Agena Astro Products. None of these companies have any input into what I say into this or any future video on these products and no money has changed hands. These companies may choose to share my YouTube video or my photos taken with the products on their website or social media, but that's completely up to them. Throughout this video, I'll be comparing the Ascar FRA 300 to the William Optics Redcat 51 because I see them as competitors in that they have fairly similar specs. The Redcat is also an astrograph, meaning the field flattening elements are built in. It's a quidruplet. It has a front aperture of 51 millimeters, a focal length of 250 millimeters. So that gives it a focal ratio of F4.9. The Ascar, on the other hand, has a front aperture of 60 millimeters, a focal length of 300 millimeters. So that gives it a focal ratio of F5. So F4.9 versus F5, but this one's a little bit longer. So they're very similar in a lot of ways. You're gonna get a slightly different field of view. Ascar did say they added pro to the end of this title because this is an F5 scope while their other FRA telescopes, the 400, the 500, and the 600 are F5.6 astrographs. And that small improvement is important for photographs because that extra half stop of light means that the photos will be brighter faster. And that's why focal ratio is sometimes referred to as photographic speed, especially if you come from the world of lenses. And it means that with a faster telescope, one with a smaller F number, which remember as a ratio, you can take shorter exposures. But it also means your signal to noise ratio will be better compared to a slower scope if we're talking the same total integration. Okay, on to the comparisons. In terms of weight with a Vixen plate, a ring, and a top handle installed, the Redcat weighs 1.8 kilograms or just over four pounds. While the FRA 300 weighs 3.4 kilograms or six pounds, 11 ounces. The Redcat package includes a soft carry case, but no top handle for a guide scope. If you do want a top handle, it costs 50 extra dollars. The FRA 300 does not include a carry case but is well equipped otherwise because it has both a top handle and a Sinta-style finder shoe attachment. And so for astrophotography, I think most people would put the guide scope on up top here, something like this. And then with this finder shoe, maybe put it like an ASI air or something like that or a power bank, something that would be useful right there for all the cable connections. In terms of focusers, the Ascar has this more traditional 2.5 inch rack and pinion design focuser with a single speed knob on this side and a double speed knob on the other side. This red knob here is a 10 to one reduction, which is very nice if you manually focus, like I have been with these telescopes. If you do want to add an autofocuser, the bottom has mounting holes already for adding something like a ZWO electronic autofocuser, EAF. If you want to add autofocusing to the Redcat with the ZWO EAF, you'll need to buy a pulley system. I have this excellent one sent to me by DeepSky Dad. And the reason you need a pulley system is because the Redcat has a helical focuser like this, like your camera lens. I have heard that in version two of the Redcat, that it's slightly different, that this front element doesn't go in and out when you move the focus ring, but that it is still a helical focuser. Both telescopes have a locking device for locking the focus. This one right here, this one underneath, as well as a knob for manual rotation, which is very handy on the Redcat. It's right here and on the FRA, it's right there. And I love having a little locking mechanism for a manual rotator. It's much better than having to like rotate the whole telescope in its ring. It's much handier and works much better. And I'm really big into picking my rotation angle, so that's a really good feature of both telescopes. In terms of mounts for these telescopes, if you're pairing them with a lightweight DSLR or mirrorless camera or a one shot color astronomy camera, I think you could go with basically any mount, including this new Skywatcher Star Adventure GTI. If you're using a mono camera with filter wheel, like I have here, the Redcat would be the safer bet because you'd be well under the weight limit of the GTI, but it actually amused me that the FRA 300 with this QHY533M and a full filter wheel, this kit that I have exactly right here, put me right at the payload limit of five kilograms for the GTI. So I actually haven't had a chance to try out this exact combo yet, but I intend to because I actually think this would be a really awesome lightweight travel set. Before I show some various photo results and star tests done with both telescopes, I'd like to tell you about the sponsor for today's video, which is Squarespace. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform for creating and hosting websites. And I've been through the process of setting up websites before, and I can tell you that Squarespace just makes it all so much easier than what I had to do before. It's actually so easy to use Squarespace's site builder and professional portfolios that I put together my revamped nicocarver.com website from scratch in under an hour. And I just, I love how it looks. I think it looks very elegant and it was just so easy that I got it done. So whether you're a photographer wanting to have your own beautiful portfolio with your own domain name like me or a small business wanting to sell basically anything online, services, products, digital products, Squarespace has you covered. And you can use the link in the description, which is squarespace.com slash nebulaphotos to get your free trial. And if you like what you see with Squarespace, which I think you will, use the code nebulaphotos for 10% off your first purchase. So next up is what I'm sure many of you really want to see which is how do these scopes compare when it comes to a star field and a full frame camera. So I shot a three minute guided exposure with match settings on the Canon ESRA on both telescopes on the same object which is the blue horse head nebula here. And I shot this within like a 10 minute window. So there wasn't much time between these two exposures. So I think it's a pretty fair comparison on the stars. And this is the full field with the red cat. This on the right is the full field with the FRA 300. And the first thing you probably notice is that it's a different crop or it's a different field of view I should say. The FRA 300 is a little bit tighter in than the red cat. But that's understandable since the red cat has a focal length of 250 and the FRA 300 it's 300 millimeters. The other thing that really stands out from just a single exposure that's not calibrated is that the red cat has pretty significant fall off of vignetting in the corners while it's pretty well illuminated in the FRA 300. So you can see that's pretty noticeable fall off here while on the FRA 300 you can see it gets a little darker in the corners but not as bad. But that fall off in the corner is not really gonna impact your astrophotography that much unless you don't shoot flats. But I always shoot flats and so after full calibration of these two frames they look quite different like this. And so you can see here now they're looking a little bit more similar both very flat and I've looked at the corners and I know that the theory is that you're gonna have much worse signal to noise ratio when you have that much light fall off but I don't know. I've looked in the corners of these shots and I don't really see a huge difference in the noise at least visually. So that gives you a sense of that. Next up let's look at some stars really zoomed in. So for this I'm going to go into image analysis, aberration inspector and run this on both shots here. Okay and there we go. And at first glance to my eye I mean these both look quite good. I don't really see glaring problems with the stars but let's go ahead and zoom in on the center here. Okay, you know they're both what we call undersampled so it was zoomed in this far. This is probably like 400% zoom. You can see a little bit of blockiness to the stars like they're not, you start to get a little bit of pixelation or whatever but they both look fine. I don't see a huge difference in sharpness. Let's look at the corners now. Okay, so this upper left corner I think I can see just a little bit more chromatic aberration, a little bit of like red separation on that star but unfortunately these aren't like perfectly matched fields so I don't have that same star here to compare like a big star right on the edge. So I don't know if that's the best comparison but I think I see a little bit of red fringe there while on the red cat stars I don't really see much of anything. Now I mean this level of chromatic aberration wouldn't bother me I don't think but it might bother some people so that's why I'm noting it. Yeah and I think you know here let's see if there's a, okay so here's a fairly good test like that's a bright star fairly close to the edge there is a bright star fairly close to the edge and I still feel like I see just a little bit more of that like blue and red separation here with the Ascar than I do with the red cat but let's keep looking. So in this corner this is the bottom right corner the star shapes look a little bit off on the red cat and a little bit more circular a little bit more round on the Ascar. There could be a tilt issue there so it might not be the optics fault. Let's go to the upper right corner. Yeah same thing in the upper right corner a little bit not as extreme as that bottom right corner but in the upper right corner I see a little bit more malformed stars on the red cat than I do on the Ascar I think but you know what? This is all sort of nitpicking because I think all of these stars look very good. I'm suitably impressed that these are 250 and 300 millimeter focal length on full frame camera that I think these are both quite impressive for you know scopes that are under a thousand dollars. I don't know what other people think but for me this is a very impressive performance. To wrap up here I haven't had the best luck with weather with this scope yet but I did get this finished image done here at home in Somerville. This is with the QHY 533M mono camera and a hydrogen alpha filter and an oxygen three filter and it's just eight exposures with the HA filter and five exposures with the O3 filter. So not a lot of data but it just I think it shows you the potential of pairing the FRA 300 with the 533M. It's an interesting combination. I think a good combination of gear. I just think this field of view 300 millimeters with that one inch square sensor is gonna work well for a lot of these sort of nebula scenes like the jellyfish here with the extended nebulosity and the two bright stars in Gemini. And you can see that I don't see any issues with star haloing or anything like that with this setup. So hopefully this review of the Ascar FRA 300 was helpful and if you have any questions you can always leave them in the comments and I'll try to answer them all. Till next time, this has been Nico Carver, Clear Skies.