 This video is sponsored by Brilliant.org. A typical refractor telescope is like a prime lens. It has one focal length. But unlike a prime lens, many imaging refractors have reducers available. These are usually optional, and they give the telescope a second effective focal length. Very few telescopes, mostly refractors from the Japanese companies Takahashi and Borg, have telescope systems with optional reducers, and extenders, giving one telescope or a telescope system three or more different focal lengths. This new telescope, though, the Ascar-V is taking this a step further. And the Ascar is selling this telescope as a modular system where you get everything all at once, nothing optional, and that system includes not only an extender, a fladdener, and a reducer, but also two different front objective lenses, a 60mm and an 80mm. And with all these different combinations of parts, you end up with six different focal lengths, all the way from 270mm at f4.5 to 600mm at f7.5. And all the honest, this modular telescope is not quite as convenient as a zoom lens to get to these different focal lengths, because with a zoom lens, all I have to do is just turn the barrel and it zooms. With this system to zoom, it means carefully changing out components, which have screw-on caps and exposed glass elements. But I think that the purchasing discussion here is similar to one that we have with camera lenses. Do you get the zoom lens of telescopes, the one that covers a variety of focal lengths, by just buying this one modular system? Or do you get a set of prime lenses, or in this case, a set of different refractors to cover that same focal length range? So that's what I'll be exploring in this review, and of course, I took some real-world imaging tests that I'll be sharing at the end of the video. Hi, my name is Nico, and since this is a review, I'm going to start with a couple disclosures. Asgar sent me this Asgar V telescope. As usual, they follow my review policy, so it's no strings attached, meaning they have no say in what I share in this video. It is a pre-production model, but they told me that there's only going to be a couple cosmetic changes between this and the production model that will be for sale. Mainly that the focuser tube here will be a slightly different color to match the other components, and that they might change the number of threads to make changing out certain parts a little bit quicker. This telescope isn't in stock today, but you can pre-order it now, and it will be shipping later this month, which is May 2023. I'm going to be comparing this telescope to two other Asgar telescopes that were originally sent to me for review, but then after the review period ended, instead of sending them back, like I often do, I purchased them directly from Asgar because I liked them and wanted to keep them, partly to make other videos like this where I could compare telescopes. Now, I want to make clear I have no particular allegiance to Asgar or Sharpstar. They've just been willing to send me lots of telescopes to review on the channel over the past couple years, which helps me out a lot, but I'll review telescopes from any company willing to send me something as long as they agree to my review policy, and lately I've been getting a lot more loaner telescopes, which is great. In my next big shootout video, I'm going to be reviewing refractors in the 85 to 90 millimeter Aperture range from Apertura, Founder Optics, SV Boney, and Stellarview. But let's get on with this video with the physical characteristics of the Asgar V telescope. The Asgar V comes in a very nice custom case. It's what I'd call a rigid soft sided case. The outside feels like cloth, but then it has this very thick high density foam inserts that you can see, give it this nice custom shape. The case with all the telescope parts inside weighs about 7.7 kilograms or 17 pounds. It's 54 centimeters long, 27 centimeters wide, and 23 centimeters deep. This is within the acceptable dimensions for carry on luggage on most commercial flights, if that's something you're considering. Let's open the case now. Inside we have the 60 millimeter objective lens with the metal screw on caps for both the front and back. And we have the extender, flatener, and reducer. These are all metal parts, very nicely machined parts. And then the telescope itself, I'd call this color scheme an off white with gunmetal gray accents. It has a sort of minimalistic design that I think looks quite good. For putting it back in the case, you put the 80 millimeter objective on, you push the retractable dew shield all the way in, and then it will fit in. It comes with a clamshell type mounting ring with guide scope attachment on top, and a vixen style dovetail plate on bottom. The plate is held on with six, no with eight quarter inch 20 screws. We also have a Cinta style finder attachment here, where you could put a power box or an ASI air. The focuser is similar to other Asgard telescopes. It's like a two inch dual speed rack and pinion. It's not quite as silky smooth as a premium focuser like a feather touch, but it's perfectly serviceable. It has the standard tension screw on the bottom, and it does have both distance markings and detailed rotation markings on the focus travel, which is always a good thing. And then it has a manual rotator built in. Last thing it includes is a visual back. So this is a compression ring for two inch or one and a quarter inch accessories like eyepieces and diagonals. And the idea here is you can use the scope visually just as a nice apochromatic triplet without any of the flatener extender reducer elements. And then you can either use the 60 millimeter or 80 millimeter front objective lens. I don't know that much about visually testing telescopes, but I did try out these configurations just to make sure they worked and they did. I looked at the moon. I looked at some open star clusters and they all looked very nice to me. No visible fringing on those. Let's next look at the available focal lengths with the telescope system. Here's a chart I made laying it all out. What you'll notice is that with the 80 millimeter objective with the reducer, that's very similar to the 60 millimeter with flatener. So in most cases between those two, I'd choose the 80 millimeter with reducer because of the bigger aperture and that makes the system faster. And the same thing here. I'd choose the 80 millimeter with flatener over the 60 millimeter with extender. Now that doesn't mean quite that I'd never pick these two configurations because for instance, if keeping the portability and keeping the weight down was the primary concern, then the 60 millimeter configurations are going to be a lot lighter than the similar 80 millimeter configurations. But if portability and weight aren't a concern, then that leaves us with four options that make the most sense with this telescope. And in this video, I'm only going to be testing the two extremes of that focal length range. And why? Well, to me, the extremes of having 270 millimeter and 600 millimeter in a single case is what makes this telescope most interesting. And the other reason I'm only going to cover those two is quiv the lazy geek who I'm sure many of you are familiar with. He has a YouTube channel. He's beaten me to the punch and already tested all the options, you know, all the six different options optically in one of his videos. So I won't bore you with the same tests in my video. I'll just say that I did the testing as well. And my tests came back just like quibs. So you can go watch his video to see those optical tests. But after you watch the rest of my video. So to have something to compare the extremes with, let's look at two other telescopes in Ascar's lineup. This is the Ascar 80 PHQ. And it does match the specs of this scope on the high end. Exactly. The 80 PHQ does 600 millimeter F 7.5 natively as an astrograph. And the Ascar V can do 600 millimeter F 7.5. If you combine the 80 millimeter lens on the front with the extender on the back, the only difference here is with the Ascar V, you do have to be precise about getting exactly 55 millimeter back focus from the end of the extender to your camera sensor with the 80 PHQ precise back focus is not required. Now I want to make clear you still may need spacers to reach focus. It's just that you can go a little bit over if you have some optional accessories you want to put in there. Like you could do 60 millimeters and that would work fine. But you may still need some spacers to to reach focus again. But that's the advantage of an astrograph. When you don't have to be precise, you can be a little bit more flexible with what you put between the camera and the back of the telescope. Now looking on the other end of the focal length range, we have the FRA 300. This is 300 millimeters at F 5 natively. So not quite 270 at F 4.5, but I think close enough. The FRA 300 is also an astrograph. So the same deal with this one in regards to spacers to reach focus, but it doesn't have to be that precise 55 millimeters while the V with reducer does. And I should also point out that when you use the different accessories with the V, the reducer, the extender, you do have to customize them by screwing the glass element so that it matches your front element. There's little markings on the reducer or extender or flatener. There's a 60 millimeter mark and an 80 millimeter mark. And so you just have to match that with whatever you're putting on front. Okay, so now let's talk about price. The FRA 300 is $949. The ADPHQ is $1495 USD. So together today they are $2,444 USD. The Ascar V is selling for $1,695 USD. And there is a promotion right now through May 15th. If you pre-order it, they'll throw in a matching guide scope. So you save about $750 USD by getting the Ascar V over two similar astrographs that would match up pretty well to the extremes of the focal length range of this system. Now the big question is what's better, having two scopes or just this one modular scope? Well, to answer that, I think the first obvious question to me is, are you completely nuts like me and someone who scrambles to set up multiple complete aster rigs each clear night? If that's you, then it's probably going to be better having two different telescopes because then you can get twice the data if you have two cameras and two mounts to go with those two telescopes. On the other hand, if you just have one primary camera and mount like a normal person, then the Ascar V is probably going to make more sense. The main thing it offers you is this flexibility in different focal lengths. So if you want to capture large deep sky objects in the sky without doing mosaics, which are difficult, we can look at 270 millimeter with a crop sensor camera and we could do the heart and soul in the same frame, which is pretty cool, or the entire spaghetti nebula, which is very hard to get with a telescope. But now there's actually lots of small telescopes that can do it. Well, something like the Galaxy M33, that's going to be pretty small at 270 millimeters. But if we go to the 600 millimeter option, then it's very nicely framed. And that's true of many objects. There's there's the sort of excel at different focal lengths. So we can get that kind of flexibility by buying two or more telescopes. But now we could potentially save $750 or more and just get the Ascar V. So to wrap up this video, let's actually look at some comparisons to see if the Ascar V holds up optically compared to these other two telescopes I've been comparing it to. Okay, here are the details for these tests that I'm about to show you. These were taken from a portal three location with no moon out. The tests are all of the M81 and 82 Galaxy pair, which are well situated right now for me at 60 degrees altitude, so high up in the sky, free of any kinds of issues that we would have in the lower atmosphere where we're shooting through a lot more layers of atmosphere. And that can add a lot of blur. These are all single three minute exposures. They were taken with the same camera, the ZWO ASI 2600MC, which is a crop sensor camera. I've moved to this camera mostly for my optical tests, because I've found that the small pixels really reveal more things than my full frame cameras, which have larger pixels. So the ideal would be if I get a full frame camera with small pixels, but that hasn't happened yet. So maybe eventually I'll get there for these tests. But for now, I've been using this one because it reveals more. And then I had these telescopes mounted on the ZWO AM5 mount. All right, let's get into it here. So I'm always going to be showing the competitor on the left and the Askar V on the right. So this is the Askar FRA 300, full scale. I can make that even bigger. Okay, just to give you an idea here. And here is the Askar V at 270 millimeters. Now you'll notice that a couple stars here have a little bit of halo on them. I think that the transparency wasn't perfect the night that I was doing this. So I expect that this is just from high altitude clouds and not an actual defect with the telescope. But these are the only tests I've been able to do because it's been mostly cloudy weather. So who knows? But I think that is from bad transparency. You can see the field of view is slightly different. The Askar is a little bit wider at 270 millimeters focal length. While this one is at 300 millimeters. But nothing is really standing out as being odd there. Let's look at the aberration inspector for these two. Again, nothing too interesting here. Let's zoom in to like 400 percent, though, to see if we can see anything of interest. Try to find a big star with this one. So this is going to be sort of, you know, nitpicking kind of thing. But if you are looking for chromatic aberration, these both definitely have it. What you're looking for here is a separation around the star. It splits the blue and the red on the stars. And you can see it when we get into the extreme corner, it might be a little bit more clear. Let's look for another one here. Yeah, you can see a little bit of blue fringe up there. I can look at another corner. Okay. And I don't know, to me, it looks pretty similar between these two scopes. They both have this kind of chromatic aberration, but they don't have a huge amount of star distortion in the corners of a crop sensor camera. The stars, meaning the stars look pretty round. They're not too misshapen. They just have that chromatic aberration. Okay, let's look at the center. And these were registered so that they match. At first glance, I don't really see much difference, but let's zoom in on bodes here. Okay, I do see a little bit of difference here. Hopefully this comes across in the video. But on the FRA 300, partly because it has a larger aperture, we're getting more contrast, more detail in the galaxy than we are here. But then this one, because it's f 4.5, looks a little bit brighter. The other thing that I'm seeing, which is a little bit alarming, is that on the Ascar V, we are seeing a chromatic aberration even in the center of the frame. While on the Ascar FRA 300 Pro, no chromatic aberration in the center. Now, this type of chromatic aberration that we're seeing on the Ascar V, where it's centered around the star, it's just like a little bit of magenta fringing. It will get worse once you stack, but the good news is, is it's pretty easy to eliminate with something like defringe tool in Photoshop or with some easy little tricks here in Pixinsight. So it's not something that would be a showstopper, because you could remove it in processing. But it's always better not to have it in the first place. And I can see on all these bright stars, it's definitely showing up here on the Ascar V and not on the Ascar FRA 300. Okay, so that's the low end of the focal length taken care of. Let's now look at the high end, 600 millimeters. So here is the Ascar 80 PHQ, and here is the Ascar V at 600 millimeters. Okay, and then we'll look at both of them with the aberration inspector. Let's zoom in to see if we can see any difference. Now these fields are slightly different. So even though they both have these bright stars, these are different bright stars. So don't judge the size of those as being comparisons. I'm just sort of looking for some stars to compare. And I don't, I think that's just noise. I'm not really seeing any chromatic aberration here, which is, here, this is a good example. Yeah, these look great. I don't see any distortion, I don't see any chromatic aberration, which is sort of to be expected at f7.5. In slower focal lengths, it really usually sharpens up the stars and you don't see the kinds of CA and distortion that you'll see at faster focal lengths. So those both look good. Let's look at details now. Don't see a huge difference here. These are all just screen stretched, by the way, so this should be pretty, should be a pretty fair comparison in terms of the contrast. We could, of course, add more contrast and stretching, but this is just to give you an idea. You know, if anything, I feel like there might be a slight edge to the Ascar V here, but since these are just single exposures, it could just be the difference between the two here in terms of detail could just be the seeing slightly changed between the two exposures. And they're very, very close. The star size looks identical. The contrast looks very close. I'm seeing maybe just a tiny bit more contrast with the Ascar V over the ADPHQ, but so close that I would say in this, in this instance, the Ascar V sort of has the same characteristics as the PHQ. So you wouldn't need both the PHQ, the ADPHQ, and the Ascar V with this one, the FRA 300 versus the Ascar V. It's, they're a little bit different, but that really could just come down to the different specs, right? F5 versus F4.5, but this one I'm not quite as excited about just because of that, the magenta chromatic aberration, which here in a single exposure is just going to look very mild. And you might be like, what is he even talking about? But I know that this is going to get worse with stacking. So it's just, it's just something to take care of in processing. It's not, again, like I said, it's not the end of the world. While I focus on astrophotography on this channel, I am also fascinated by astronomy and astrophysics, as I'm sure many of you are. So for that reason, I'm very excited to be sponsored by Brilliant. Brilliant.org is a website with very engaging interactive lessons for learning science, math, and computer science in a really fun, engaging way. And so let's say like me, you didn't, you started astrophotography without any background in astrophysics. Then I'd highly suggest starting with the Astrophysics Toolbox series here on Brilliant.org. It assumes you know nothing, but it doesn't feel like it's insulting your intelligence either. It's just a lot of fun. Even if you have learned some of this stuff previously, like in a high school physics course, it's always good to refresh and sharpen your knowledge of these basics. And I can't think of a better way to do it in just a few minutes each day. And with Brilliant, they are adding new courses and lessons each month. So there's always going to be plenty to choose from. If you're interested, head to Brilliant.org slash Nebula Photos to get started with Brilliant's interactive lessons. The first 200 to sign up for free through my link will also get 20% off an annual premium membership. If you love astrophotography, which I assume you do if you're watching this video, I think you're going to really enjoy my Patreon community. We are closing in on 1000 members and it's just a very supportive and welcoming group of astrophotographers. They're all very open in you know, sharing knowledge and we do a lot of really fun things together. We do Zoom calls, monthly imaging challenges, a bunch of private channels on my Discord server where people are talking all the time. And in addition to all that, you get direct messaging support with me. So if you have any questions, you can ask me and I'll get back to you usually within a day or two. So I think it's well worth checking out. My Patreon starts at just $1 per month to join. Well, I hope you enjoyed this one. Till next time, this has been Nico Carver. Clear skies.