 I have a confession to make. For a few years now, I've been doing astrophotography on easy mode. You know, after finding I could reliably get good results with smaller refractors like this one, I just stuck with that. I didn't have to leave my comfort zone. I knew I could get good data each and every night on wide field targets. And I was pretty happy for a number of years. But lately I've been getting that itch. You know that itch for a new challenge in the hobby. And so I asked Ascar to send me this telescope for review. This is the brand new Ascar 130PHQ with a .7X full frame reducer. So this video is a review of the telescope, but you'll also hear about my personal challenges in getting good results with a big, heavy telescope. And I'll share my opinions about whether those challenges are worth it in the end. Hello, my name is Nico and this channel is all about Deep Sky Astrophotography, which I've been obsessed with for several years now. Since this video is partly a review, I'm gonna start by disclosing that Ascar, the company, sent me this telescope and the reducer at my request. They have no input into what I say about the telescope. This is a completely independent review. And after the review is over, I can either return the telescope to Ascar or if I want, I can keep it and purchase it from them. This video does have a sponsor, which is brilliant. And I'm gonna say more about them a little bit later. Okay, so one thing that drew me into astrophotography is that I love a good challenge. And astrophotography is full of them. But once you've been in the hobby a few years, you can get to the point where things that once seemed super challenging are now old hat. So whenever I get that feeling of like not being challenged, I'm usually looking for some kind of new thing to really amp it up, which brings me to this telescope, which has been my latest challenge. And to start off with, let's think about why do people even like big telescopes for astrophotography? Well, in a nutshell, they offer finer resolution that allows us to see more in our photos, more dimmer stars, more detail in the structures of the nebulae, details in smaller galaxies, background galaxies. So the opportunity for better resolution is there with a bigger telescope. But to take advantage of that opportunity, everything has to go just right. And unfortunately, to get everything right with a bigger telescope is a whole lot harder. So what many beginners find is that they, you actually go from a big telescope to a smaller one and their images get better. And I know that seems counterintuitive, but I've seen it so many times that I think I can explain the usual reason that that happens. The first one is a beginner is less likely to have picked all of the right gear. And then even more importantly, is less likely to know how to fine tune and get all of that gear working to its full potential. So for instance, with a smaller telescope, you can basically use any auto guiding setup. And as long as you get it working reasonably well, your stars are going to be round in the end. With a big telescope, you really need that guiding dialed in. And for that reason, I'm using an off-axis guider, which means that some of the light coming through the main telescope reflects off a little pick-off prism and then into the guide camera. So another huge thing that can bite you with long, heavy telescopes are environmental conditions. For example, the bigger the telescope is, the more surface area there is for wind to catch on the side of the telescope and disturb your photo. You would be amazed at how even a subtle little wind gust can cause a big spike in your guiding with a telescope this big. This is why if you go to a star party these days, you'll see a lot of people have these sky boxes, basically a portable observatory made out of pipes and tarps with an open roof to the sky. And these sky boxes do a really good job of keeping the wind from hitting the telescope. Personally, I've been resistant to getting something like that because I travel in a sedan that's usually already full of astro gear. So I just really don't have the room or the patience to set one up. Another environmental condition that is of concern with big telescopes is astronomical seeing, which is basically turbulence in the different layers of the atmosphere. And seeing is something that has very little effect on wide field imaging, but can have huge effects once you're at a finer pixel scale as you will be with a big telescope. So basically what you'll find is that some nights, your ability to resolve those fine details that your big telescope is capable of is actually limited by the seeing. There is just too much blur from the seeing to resolve anything smaller than a certain limit. So let's say three arc seconds. In that case, any detail that is smaller than three arc seconds gets blurred out, no matter what. So this is why when we get into really big telescopes like a plane wave or something like that, people send those kinds of telescopes out to remote observatories where the seeing conditions are often better than just a backyard. I found that variations in seeing conditions can be annoying even with a five inch refractor like this one, but I haven't even gotten to the things that I found most challenging while testing this telescope. The first one is with my current mount setup. This is just an EQ6R on a tripod, the tripod that came with it. I couldn't track some objects near the zenith because the camera hanging off this super long telescope actually would run into the tripod legs if I tried to point it near the zenith. So I would need a peer extension or a portable peer to even use the telescope if I wanted to shoot something in Cygnus right now, which is my favorite constellation. The second thing that got me and this was really frustrating because I couldn't figure it out for hours. When you get something this heavy, this kind of camera filter wheel telescope onto ground that's a little bit spongy like when it's rained a little bit earlier, the weight of this setup will cause the tripod to sink into the ground, but not evenly. So one telescope leg is sinking faster than the others. And what I'd see is I'd have perfect polar alignment, then I'd slew the telescope, the weight would shift and I'd watch pole master and see the polar alignment go completely bonkers and my guiding would be complete crap. But again, I didn't think of this spongy ground problem because I don't think I've ever seen it before with lighter weight setups. So this is something that I think really affects people with heavy scopes. The third thing that has been interesting with this telescope is any issue with tilt or back focus spacing, not being dead on perfect has been very obvious in the results. And I think that makes sense. The finer that you're sampling the stars, the more it's critical that everything with tilt, back focus, all those kinds of things are really dialed in to like fractions of a millimeter. So I'm admittedly releasing this review before I have completely resolved all of my issues with back focus and tilt, but I'm gonna talk through what we're seeing when we look at the results and how we can improve those pictures with more tinkering. You've seen in this video that I enjoy working through astrophotography challenges, but I also enjoy challenging myself by keeping up with science, math, and computer science. And my favorite way to learn new skills is to learn by doing. And that's where Brilliant's interactive visual lessons on everything from programming with Python to classical mechanics really shine. Brilliant has thousands of lessons in this stuff with new material added every month. So I can just log in each day to spend a few minutes. It's really quick and fun. And I'm learning to be a better problem solver, which definitely comes in handy for astrophotography where the problem seemed to never cease. So to get started with Brilliant for free, visit brilliant.org slash Nebula Photos or click on the link in the description. The first 200 will get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription. This telescope is a lot like the ADPHQ, which I've already reviewed. It's just bigger, of course. It's a quad, so you can use it without worrying about back focus, but at 1,000 millimeter focal length and a focal ratio of F 7.7. Or you can use it how I mostly have been with the optional 0.7x reducer, which brings it down to 700 millimeter focal length at F 5.4. The reducer screws into this adapter stack that's included with the reducer. And then the back focus requirement is stated as 55 millimeters from the back of the adapter stack to the image sensor. All of the other mechanical stuff was super well done on this telescope. Inside there are tons of baffles and everything down to the adapters has a nice matte black paint job. So there are no shiny bits to cause unwanted reflections. Comes with good telescope rings, a long 300 millimeter Lausmande dove plate. Nice top handle included. The focuser seems substantial. It's a 3.4 inch rack and pinion. It has distance markings on the draw tube, a manual rotator. One thing missing is the ADPHQ has this nice degree markings. Well, for some reason they didn't include that with the 130. All right, and now under the main event of any telescope review, how did it perform optically? The first image we're looking at here is at 1,000 millimeters. So this is without the optional reducer. This is just the native resolution of the telescope. And it's at F7.7. This is a single two minute exposure with my Canon EOS RA at 5.36 micron pixels. And I'm gonna put up all the relevant sort of information on each picture as we're looking at them over here on the right-hand side. There is a little bit of vignetting or fall-off, light fall-off in the corners. I don't think that's from the telescope itself. I suspect it's from the 48 millimeter adapter that I was using to attach the Canon RA. That would come out completely fine with flats, but if I really was concerned about getting rid of it entirely, I could move to something like a 54 millimeter adapter. Now, when I first look at this star field, by the way, this star field is the elephant trunk star field, but you're not seeing the nebula because it was taken on a full moon night just for testing. But it's best, I think when you're testing a telescope to shoot with a one-shot color camera for testing purposes to see the stellar performance because then you can see any kind of chromatic aberration that's gonna come up by trying to focus all the light, all the visible light at the same time. And I don't see any chromatic aberration with this telescope. I do see when we use the aberration inspector, a little bit of softening and aberration, I guess, misshaped stars in the corners. And that's to be expected with a full frame sensor, even one that, even with a flat field astrograph, you're not probably gonna get perfect, perfect stars in the corners. But this is pretty impressive for telescopes that I've looked at. So again, a little bit, not quite as sharp in the corners as in the center, but nothing that would really bother me too much. Next, let's look at it with the reducer. So with the reducer, of course, you're getting a much bigger field of view. It also changes the resolution in terms of arc seconds per pixel, which you can see over here. There is also more vignetting, or light fall off in the corners. And again, I think that's because of the adapter stack. But since the light cone we're seeing now is bigger, we're seeing also more vignetting. But again, nothing to really worry about because with flats, that would go away. Let's look at the aberration inspector. And at first glance, it looks fairly similar to the one at 1,000 millimeters. But then when I really compared them, I am pretty sure these are different stars because it's a different field of view. But I'm pretty sure that the stars in the corners are quite a bit sharper with the reducer on compared to without it. Now, it could just be a resolution difference, but they just look closer to the center stars with the reducer than they do here, where I'm seeing a more marked difference between the sharpness of the center stars and the corner stars. So take that for what you will, but everything looks a little bit sharper to me with the reducer on. Okay, and then I have one more thing to show you with the Canon RA, which is since it was a full moon when I was doing this testing, I took a video of the full moon. And I'll just play a little bit of the video because it was recording sound and there was some interesting sounds going on when I was recording this. So appropriate for it being close to Halloween, a pack of coyotes I think howling at the moon. It was pretty fun when I heard that. And in terms of the moon performance, it looks really good to me. I mean, I think it looks sharp, no false color or haloing or anything like that. So I think this could be a good lunar or solar scope as well. Okay, next we're gonna look at a little bit of my mistakes here in testing this scope, but hopefully it's useful information if you're sort of trying to dial in a telescope and camera system. So this is with the QHY268M, which has smaller pixels. So it's not gonna be quite as forgiving as the Canon RA. And this is a crop sensor, APSC, with the reducer. And when I got back this data and started looking at it, this is from the first night I had the telescope out and I looked at the aberration inspector, I wasn't happy with this. And at first I thought, oh, is it just the telescope? That's the best performance I can get. But then the closer I looked at it, the more I realized, oh, wow, all of these stars are elongated going out from the center. So you can see in this corner, they're going out and to the bottom right. In this corner, they're going out and to the top right. So they all, and when you see that pattern of all of the elongation going out away from center, it means that your camera sensor is too close in terms of back focus. And I had it at 55 millimeters and then I realized, oh yeah, the back focus changes when you add in filters because the filters have a thickness and then that changes how the light works in it and you have to add up to a millimeter or two based on the thickness of your filters. And so it's actually one third of the filter thickness is how much you should add to the back focus calculation. And so it clearly was needed with this telescope. So the next night out, I added a one millimeter spacer and here is the full picture, just auto-stretched. And then here is the aberration inspector. And if we compare it to the first night, we can see we've definitely made improvements all around. And this corner, this upper left corner actually looks near perfect to me, especially compared to there, but this corner is actually still pretty bad. And this corner is pretty bad, but now in a different way, right? Instead of the stars elongated into the center, they're now elongated sort of perpendicular to the center. And so, but up here, they're still elongated away from center. So what this indicates to me is I traded in bad back focus distance for tilt. And it's probably from that little one millimeter spacer I added, not being perfectly flat or something. And so, yes, annoying, still haven't completely dealt with it, but again, I don't see this as a problem with the telescope. It's just user error in a way. I just have to keep fiddling with these things until it's perfect. Because if we look over here again in this upper corner compared to center, this is a lot more like what I would expect based on the results with the Canon RA of the corners being very sharp on a crop sensor. Okay, so despite all of my problems, here is my final result, which I am actually quite happy with. This was taken over two nights. It's a combination of this data that didn't turn out that great in terms of the corners and this data, which again, still had tilt, but it was a little bit better. So if we look at the corners of this, I can zoom in on them, you can see the stars are not perfectly round. They're a little bit wonky. And that's okay with me because I still think the overall impression of this is quite good and I was very impressed with the resolution that I was getting. So I picked this target in particular because I knew that it was a nice big dusty nebula appropriate for Halloween. It's sometimes called the anglerfish nebula, which is a very scary looking fish. But it also has these little spiral background galaxies that you're only gonna pick up any detail on with enough aperture. So I thought this was a great target for my first light with this telescope. And I'm again, really happy with how it turned out. It's probably, I always sort of say with my newest image, this is one is my favorite one ever, but this one really, I really do like this quite a lot. It's probably in my top five that I've ever taken. I just think it has some nice sort of three dimensionality and really brought out a lot of detail in the dust and in those little background galaxies and the stars look colorful. And for the most part, the halos are nice and round and all of the right color. And I'm not seeing any sort of problems you sometimes get where you get multi-colored stars. You know what I mean? Where it's like rainbow stars where you see different colors in the halo. These are all just like the star should just be showing one color in a halo, whether it's a blue star or a white star, and that's what I'm seeing. So I think this, despite all of my challenges and there were many, I probably spent about four nights on this image while only actually capturing two nights of data because some nights I just got out and because of the spongy ground or the wind or whatever it was, I didn't get anything. So I guess for me, it's not a workhorse scope. You know, one I can just put out and every night I'm gonna get good data with but for special projects where I really need this kind of resolution, it's probably unbeatable. I mean, I think that it's a fair price, $3,500 and it's just, it's really incredible to me how much detail and how different this image feels than anything I've done before. So if you're new to the hobby, I don't, you might have surmised from this video that I don't expect you to go out and buy a huge 25 pound telescope like this but if you have been in the hobby a while and you're looking for a new challenge, a big refractor might be a good challenge for you and it definitely was for me. And you're now seeing all of my current members on my Patreon campaign. If you wanna see your name in the credits, you can sign up over on patreon.com slash nebulaphotos. It has a bunch of benefits outside of your name and the credits of long videos. I have made some exclusive videos just for Patreon. There's monthly Zoom chats. There's a Discord community where you can ask questions. There's monthly imaging challenges. There's imaging projects with a group and of course there's direct way to message me with all of your comments and questions. So if you like these videos, you want to learn more and learn faster, consider joining over there on Patreon for as little as $1 a month. Again, the link is patreon.com slash nebulaphotos. Until next time, this has been Nico Carver. Clear skies.