 This is the new Asgard 185 APO Refractor and the timing of this review couldn't be better because when Asgard reached out to ask me to test this I just put up the walls on my observatory and the observatory has been super helpful in testing a Telescope this massive to give you an idea of the size of this Here is the front aperture side-by-side comparison with the Asgard 130 PHQ Which is previously the biggest refractor I've ever used here is the length comparison and as you can see in this comparison The 185 with the camera attached in the right focal position just barely works with my observatory floor When pointed at Xenia if I was doing visual with this telescope It would I would have to have a much taller pier to get it a comfortable viewing position seated But if you do get past those hurdles is it worth $4,800 if you're an astro imager with the right kind of setup for it That's what I'll be addressing in this video By giving you my impressions of course and then imaging test results from using this gigantic refractor Over several nights over the past month Hey, my name is Nico. I'm interested in all kinds of astrophotography Personally my specialty is deep sky imaging and this is a review of this telescope So I'll start with a couple disclosures. This Asgard 185 APO was sent to me by Asgard for review It's a telescope that's currently still a pre-order item, but should be available very soon the ZWO 6200 cameras were lent to me from ZWO and I think these are probably the best cameras for testing optics today because they have the small pixels But full frame sensor which is a really deadly combination. It really puts these optics to the test So thank you to Asgard and ZWO And I should point out that neither company has any input into what I say in this review This is an independent review. So let's start with the basic properties and design of this telescope This is an APO triplet refractor in Asgard's fairly new APO triplet line Which includes a 103, a 120, a 140, and now the 185. The idea with this product line is affordable APO triplets each one with matched fladdeners and fladdener reducers and then they can be used as visual instruments as well as for astrophotography. And yes I did say affordable for a telescope retailing at five thousand about five thousand US dollars And I'm sure many of you are asking how is that affordable? Well, try comparing this to other APO triplet refractors at this aperture And when you do that, you'll see that this is actually incredibly low priced compared to the competition on the market today Now I am not saying that this telescope is as good as those more expensive ones I don't have those here to test and I know that they use different Types of glass for instance and things like that that justifies the price I'm only pointing out that for its category a seven inch triplet APO refractor It's the most affordable option out right now by far and I'm sure many people will be thinking but that's just for fractors What about other kinds of telescopes that you can use for imaging at this aperture or similar aperture like Newtonian reflectors Cater diopteryx scopes like Schmidt-Cassegrain's and sure if you want to expand this to you know Reflectors and other types of telescopes you can find much more affordable options But of course the trade-offs and one of those trade-offs being that it's hard to find telescopes less expensive at this aperture That are actually well corrected for imaging with a full-frame sensor Which of course is going to be one of my tests that you'll see in this video And there is a number of other trade-offs Because there's a lot more to telescope design than just the aperture But back to the 185 it comes packaged with a hard-sided case with wheels on the outside Of course, and then it has custom-cut foam on the inside It also comes with a top handle very nice machined rings and a substantial 400 millimeter Las mandi plate the focuser is a three and a half inch rack-and-pinion style focuser There are optional accessories like a 1x fladdener and a point 8x reducer fladdener Those are most you know useful for imaging and to install one of those you just take off the visual back and screw in the fladdener From there you can use The back threads 48 millimeter threads. You just need 55 millimeter back focus to your camera sensor So I'm using a ZWO camera here I just use the spacers that are included and that gets me to 55 millimeters Most cameras will will come with spacers or connection diagrams at least to help you get to that 55 millimeter back focus The telescope itself with the rings and the dovetails weighs about 38 pounds or 17 kilograms with a guide scope and Fladdener and astronomy camera attached it weighs 43 pounds or 19 kilograms So that's right on the edge of the payload limit for this sky watch or EQ 6R mount that I did use for testing It has a payload limit of 44 pounds. So just one pound off I did use 411 pound counterweights and ideally this is I gotta say not the right mount for imaging with this telescope because a Good rule of thumb is not to max out your payload limit for imaging with any Equatorial mount I did have pretty good results though And I think a big part of that is I was imaging from a concrete pier inside an observatory with Walls that are about seven feet tall and so you have both Wind block but also a ton of concrete going four feet into the ground. It's really providing a stable foundation for the mountain telescope So without that, I think I would have had a lot more problem with this mount I would have needed a beefier mount and probably a portable pier for this The reason I suggest a portable pier is that with a telescope this long You're gonna have a lot of problems with Running into the legs if you're using a normal tripod and if you're a visual observer I don't have any really specific advice other than your mount and Tripod or pier or whatever is gonna have to be quite tall to use this even seated. Okay in terms of the build quality I think this seems to be very well done. The fit and finishes are all very nice I haven't found anything loose or strange In visually inspecting and trying all the different connections and things like that Like I said, it does have a top handle here Which doubles as a place to attach accessories like a guide scope the back of the telescope here is contracted with this retractable tube It's fully, you know contracted for storage and then also if you want to use the scope with a binow viewer For imaging other uses you're gonna extend this part all the way out with this captain's wheel The focuser is very nice at three and a half inch Rack-and-pinion with a 10 to 1 reduction knob dual speed of course and it on the back on the bottom It has the holes for mounting electronic focus here on the focus travel It shows both markings in indicating how far the focuser is extended and rotational markings here for the manual rotator The total length of the telescope with the flatener and the camera attached the extension out the dew shield extended is 5 feet 2 inches or 157 centimeters the included case is 47 inches long by 14 inches wide by 15 inches high and I'll put the metric equivalence up on screen It does fit in the back of my current car Which is a Subaru Crosstrek with one of the back seats down these specifications for imaging on this are 1295 millimeter focal length at f7 with the 1x flatener 1036 millimeter focal length at f 5.6 with the 0.8 x reducer and again Both of these the flatener and the flatener reducer are optional. They're $300 each You're gonna want to pick up at least one if you're doing imaging if you're using it as a visual telescope You won't need those which is why they're optional and now my favorite part of this review is actually Evaluating the images that I took with this telescope. So let's jump on the computer and check those out Okay, this first test is a video obviously it's something I wasn't even planning on doing but I was looking at the moon with the telescope Through a nice explore scientific eyepiece and I was really impressed by the view one of the best lunar views I'd ever seen And so I just decided I'm gonna swap in my camera my Canon rA and take a quick video here And I think it looks pretty good. This is the Canon rA has a 4k crop mode meaning it just takes 4k from the middle of the sensor and this is at the full resolution of the telescope 1295 at f7 and You know, you can see that there's some Erecurrence astronomical seeing moving across the surface of the moon there and I'm not a lunar imaging expert So if there are any lunar photographers that want to leave a comment and let me know what you think of this I'd be really happy to know but It's definitely detailed and no false color or color fringing that I can see But I'm more of an expert on Deep sky imaging. So let's go over to pics insight here and take a look at some of the tests That I did. So this first image you're seeing here is just a single sub a four-minute sub exposure with the 1x flatener and the asi 6200 mc that full-frame camera and This is a good test just to see the vignetting Here is the flat and you can see it matches well against this So the the flat completely takes away that vignetting for anyone that wants to see the Stars from a single sub exposure. This is what they look like You can see that the corners look pretty good here in terms of star shape people are always asking me to show this So I'm gonna indulge People who want to see this the reason I typically don't show these numbers is because they can be very easily misinterpreted because You it's sort of a black box You don't know how much is going to be mount performance versus your sky conditions and all these different factors that go into this But in any case The full width half maximum The median value was 4.4 pixels And so at 0.6 arc seconds per pixel that's something like 2.6 arc seconds In terms of the full width half maximum The centricity We have a median of 0.39 I believe pics insight says That anything under 0.42 Is going to look perfectly round or It's not going to look noticeably out of round at least so these seem like reasonable values to me, but If you if you want to disagree feel free in the comments I'm not going to talk too much about the numbers Okay, and then here is a single with the reducer and if we go back to the flatener you can see that the vignetting is Quite a bit more with the reducer than it is with the flatener, which is to be expected And you can definitely see that here in this analysis with the the dark corners Here is the full width half maximum and eccentricity Here we have a slightly lower pixel value median for the full width half maximum But since we changed our image scale, this is actually a slightly worse result It's a three arc second full width half maximum or remember the other one was 2.6 and then um The eccentricity is actually slightly better 0.37. Well, I think the other one was 0.39 But again anything below 0.42 and you're golden here is 10 sub exposures 10 four minute sub exposures stacked together and just auto stretched And you can see with the flats we now have You know a nice flat field no problems with vignetting in the corners And here is the stars And so what I want you to note here is that if you look at the star shapes, they're pretty good In all of these different squares So these are the extreme corners and this is the center and you can see that the star shapes look Pretty much the same whether you're in the corners or you're in the center And that's something askar is really good at is Is getting really nice performance in terms of star shape across a large field in this case a full frame sensor with small pixels Okay, and compared to the one with the flatner again very nice job all the Stars look pretty good. I will say that there's a little bit more of this little Flare effect you can see it very slightly with the flatner, but then with the reducer It's a little bit more obvious On some of the corner stars some of the bright corner stars with the reducer That's really minimal though. I've seen much much worse than that. I mean in terms of star shapes This is pretty amazing. I I have nothing to complain about here now That's star shape now the other big thing that we look at when we are examining stars with telescopes here Is chromatic aberration because I just took my 10 sub stack And I really Saturated it both for the flatner and for the reducer here in both cases. I think that at this 100 percent Zoom view, I really don't see any problems Now if we want to really really pixel peep here, we can do the mosaic view on these Um blown up details And even then I don't really see much of an issue But if you zoom in on these like if you really want to pixel peep Let's zoom in here Okay, now you can see a little bit of this sort of um color split which is suggesting There's going to be Issues with chromatic aberration if you really want to pixel peep it And so what I'm seeing here is see how these stars both in the reducer and in the flatner version They're blue on the top But then warm color. I don't know sort of a yellowish reddish color on the bottom This is an extreme test though. I want to make that clear you might if you if you're not someone who really Saturates your stars and really wants to just get those really colorful stars. You might never even see this. Um, but It it is a display of of chromatic aberration if you really want to pixel peep the data there Okay, and so that's all sort of the imaging tests that I want to show with this telescope Now I just want to show some of the processed things that I created This is the first thing that I I wanted to Create which is just a detail in on the elephant trunk with the f7 data and I was really Happy with this to see this amount of detail is pretty cool. I've never had a telescope I think that showed this much detail on the these cool little reflection nebulae in the Core part of the elephant trunk here like this is a nice little like yellow reflection nebula with the HA emission sneaking through the keyhole there and then this blue reflection nebula You know it at lower focal lengths that just sort of turns into like a little blob But here you can see the the contours and ridges of it. I just think that looks really neat so That's really zoomed in that's a really small detail Here is the full ha rgb shot This is about two and a half hours. So one hour of h alpha data and then one hour 20 minutes with the One shot color. I also did some mono with this so ha s2 and o3 to give you a Full narrow band look at the elephant trunk with this telescope This was with at f7 with the flattener for some reason I'm more drawn right now to the ha rgb to the to the more true color Ever since I've moved out here to the portal three area I guess I guess I've sort of not been as into narrow band partly because I did a lot of narrow band when I lived in the city So so now I'm more into the the true color kind of imaging So I liked this shot, but I just found it a little bit boring because I've done shots like it before So what I did with this one is I cropped it And then did a little further processing on the crop and that's sort of my final image for this video that I really enjoyed You know making this image it's the kind of image I've never created before because it's just really zoomed in details on on a familiar target to me a target that I've shot Dozens of times but never in this kind of detail And so that's exciting to me and it makes me excited to try out this telescope a little bit more Because it's it's really fun. I think to to shoot this zoomed in and now that I have the observatory It's a lot easier to to use a telescope this big. So that's it for this one. Hope you enjoyed it Until next time. This has been Nico Carver. Clear skies