 This video is sponsored by Squarespace. This telescope costs $300. This telescope costs $1,400. This telescope costs $1,900. And this telescope costs $2,300. All four are refractors with apertures between 86 and 90 millimeters and focal lengths between 464 and 560 millimeters. In this video, I'm going to review these telescopes from a deep sky astrophotography perspective. And I'll present my results from a one night shootout with the same equipment all capturing the Pinwheel Galaxy, which is a very exciting target right now because it has a new, very bright supernova explosion within it. And I'll say a bit more about that at the very end of the video. So definitely stick around for that. Hi, my name is Nico. And this channel is all about astrophotography, the art of capturing the night sky. And while you don't need a telescope to start out an astrophotography because I have many videos on shooting with just a normal camera and lens, many of us eventually do buy a telescope because they typically have some advantages over lenses in terms of light gathering, having well-corrected optics for shooting the stars, and other features that a normal lens may lack. The dollar amounts that I have in the title and the intro for these telescopes are only for the telescopes themselves. So to get actual photographs of deep sky objects with these telescopes, you'd also need a good quality motorized mount, a camera, an auto guiding system, a number of cables, and a computer. And if all of this is new to you, this is your first video about astrophotography, I'd suggest actually not watching this one and go to my overview video where I show different rigs at different price points and sort of explain what goes into it. And then I've also done other telescope review shootouts. I have one on 80 millimeter aperture refractors and another on 60 to 65 millimeter aperture refractors. So this is now an 86 to 90 millimeter aperture shootout. And the 86 to 90 millimeter aperture range is pretty great for imagers like me who love shooting Nebulae, but also might occasionally want to go after a brighter galaxy like Messier 101. Since this video is a review, let me share a few disclosures up front. The SB Boney SV48P was bought by myself with proceeds from my Patreon campaign and it has been featured before when I wanted to talk about refractors versus reflectors. This Founder Optics FOT86 was lent to me by Founder Optics for the purpose of this review. No money exchanged hands, they are not telling me what to say. And I will be sending it back to them after the review period. Same thing with this Apertura 90 millimeter triplet, no strings attached, lent to me by Highpoint Scientific. This Stellar View SV86Q, or SVQ86 I should say, I actually bought it in 2018. So about five years ago now and it was featured in my, it's very, not my first, but my second video on the channel which is sort of like an overview video. I've always wanted to do a review of it but then right after I bought it, Stellar View discontinued it. They only made one really small batch. So I never really got around to the review because it was sort of like, well, you can't buy it. But I thought this is a perfect opportunity to finally review it. And so the only way you can buy this scope now is if you happen to find one of the few dozen that were produced on the used market. I am not selling mine because I love this telescope but you might be lucky and find it somewhere. Okay, so the first thing to compare with these refractors is their optical designs. The SV Boney SV48P 90 millimeter is an acromatic doublet meaning a refractor telescope with two glass elements neither are ED glass. ED means extra low dispersion and the benefit of ED glass is that it helps control the violet halos that you're gonna see in a doublet refractor like this SV Boney. It does not include a field flatener nor could I find one for sale from SV Boney for this particular telescope. So I'm using it as is with no corrector and correctors just, you know, help sharpen up the corners with a larger field. The telescope has 90 millimeter aperture, 500 millimeter focal length. So that makes it a focal ratio of F5 which is great for deep sky, plenty fast. The Founder Optics FOT86 is an apochromatic triplet and two of the three glass elements are ED glass. They don't specify the ED glass type. They also state that the glass elements are widely spaced which is I guess is not unusual and similar to the design of the famous Takahashi TOA line of refractors which are widely regarded as excellent scopes. And the company also states that this telescope has a well corrected 44 millimeter image circle. So it should handle full frame sensors just fine. It includes a field flatener in the package. The telescope has an 86 millimeter aperture and five 60 millimeter focal length. So that makes the focal ratio F6.5. There is an 0.8 X reducer listed on their website but I don't have that for this review. The Apertura 90 millimeter triplet is an apochromatic triplet with ED glass elements and they specified that the ED glass type is FPL 53 which is a special kind of glass made by the Japanese company Ohara. They also state a 44 millimeter image circle for full frame imaging. They do also include a 1X field flatener in the package and this telescope has a 90 millimeter front aperture with four, five 40 millimeter focal length and that puts it at F6. Lastly, we have the SVQ86 from StellarView. This is a quadruplet design. It is apochromatic. It does not need a field flatener because the corrector elements are built into the telescope. You'll often hear these kinds of telescopes called astrographs because they're really designed for imaging with a camera, not looking through an eyepiece. This scope is discontinued as I mentioned so I can't remember all the stated specs and the web page is down but I believe the image circle was stated at 60 millimeters which is plenty large. It has a front aperture of 86 millimeters and a focal length of 464 which makes the focal ratio F5.4. Next, let's look at the physical characteristics of these telescopes and I'll go over what is included when you buy each telescope. All right, here's the SV Boney SV48. According to my measurement here, it weighs 2.3 kilograms or five pounds, one ounce. The design language on mine is pretty bare bones, no even branding here on the Dew Shield. I have seen on Amazon, they seem to have updated it so now it says SV Boney right there. They also seem to add rings which is nice so you could rotate the telescope that way. On my version here, they just have a little bolted on vixen dovetail on the bottom. It does work just fine but rings would be a nice addition. Here on right in front of the focuser, we have a little Cinta style finder shoe. It did come with that. The focuser is pretty basic. It's just a two speed, I don't know if this is a crayford or just something simple here, works okay. It's just a little slow and sticky but it works just fine. It does have markings for travel so let's see how far out this goes. It's a 70 millimeter travel on the focuser. Okay, the Dew Shield does not have a lock so that just means if you put a heavy flat panel on it or something, you just have to be a little bit careful. I just recommend taping it in that case. Okay, the front cap is metal and it's a screw on. Which is not my favorite as imagine trying to do this in the cold at night. It's a little tough. And the appearance here, I'd call this a semi gloss. It's fairly matte actually but not like super matte. And it's a white with like a little bit of bubble texture on the coat and then we have a few little gold accents. Mine came in this hard case, silver hard case with a custom soft foam insert and sort of a bubbly foam on the top works out quite well. And nice that they include this for a $300 telescope. Okay, here's the Founder Optics FOT 86. Once you put on the rings and the dovetail it clocks in at around 54 centimeters. It weighs 4.8 kilograms or 10 pounds, eight ounces. The look is pretty unique. It's this nice shiny gloss black with green anodized accents and some silver hardware. You can see the logo here on the dew shield and in a couple other places like on the field flabner. Front cap is metal and it's a little tough to take off and on. You can see here, hopefully you can see here the inside of the dew shield is a nice sort of like ridged mat and there are baffles all the way down the telescope. Okay, the ring hardware looks plenty substantial. Comes with a nice sized Vixen dovetail plate there. They have three retaining screws for tightening up the dew shield, which is appreciated. There's a number of holes on the top of the rings here. There's a nice flat surface with I think these are a quarter inch, 20 screw holes. Okay, back here we have the two inch focuser. It does have a Sinta style shoe on there if you want to use a finder scope or a guide scope maybe there. This top lock nut is for rotation. So the entire focuser has 360 degree rotation that you can walk down right there. The bottom, of course, we have another locking nut here for tensioning or locking down focus. And this is like a nice really substantial one. I really like that, that it's like nice and big, very easy to find in the dark. The focuser is incredibly silky smooth. Like the mechanics on this are top notch, really, really nice. Of course it has the 10 to one reduction knob. If you do want to add a ZWO EAF to this, you do need to buy a special bracket but it will work with the bracket. You can see here we have a geared teeth for the focuser travel. And on the top, it does have millimeter markings for the distance that the focuser goes out. It goes out 95 millimeters. And then this is really unique. I've never seen a focuser quite like this one. So a lot of focusers will accept, you know, a two inch barrel or two inch eyepiece back here with like thumbscrews, like three thumbscrews. This is more like a rotolock system where it's like you just turn it left to loosen, turn it right to tighten. And then there's tensioning all inside there to tighten it down, like a compression ring. And their included field flatener has like a little ridge right there where the compression ring is tightening down. So it's very secure. You don't have to worry about anything moving with that even though it doesn't have a threaded connection. So for photography, you'd always be using the field flatener or the flatener reducer and the matched one from Founder Optics. So this is very easy. Now, the reason this is cool is with a lot of telescope systems to go from photography to visual and back and forth, it's a big ordeal because you have all these threaded connections and spacers and all this stuff, like a visual back and a photography back are often different things. Well, with this one, if I just wanted to quickly go from photography mode to visual mode, I could just take off the field flatener with the camera and everything connected back here, take this whole thing out, put in a two inch diagonal right there for an eyepiece and be done, you know, just tighten it and loosen it and it's really, really fast. I was just thinking about that, that this would be a really versatile scope if you liked doing both visual and photography with a refractor like this. In terms of the field flatener itself, it's a two inch field flatener. It comes with connections back here on the camera side for both M48 and M42, so that's very handy. Okay, in terms of what else it came with, it came with a really cool inspection report that is actually analyzing this particular copy of the telescope with optical tests and mechanical checking, resolution test, so all kinds of cool things. It's signed by Emily Chang, that's really neat. And then it also comes with a printed manual, a nice little thank you and QR code for finding out more information. This is the hard case that it comes with. It does come with some foam. You can get it back in here, of course, but it does require taking the Vixen Dovetail off. So it's not the most convenient in terms of a travel case, but it works. And honestly, I don't end up using these travel hard cases that come with the telescopes that often because once you put a camera and imaging stuff on it, they don't fit in the case anymore anyways. So I really just saved these for if I was ever gonna resell the scope. I didn't use this, but it does come with a top handle, if you wanna put that on. And it does come with this nice rotolocking adapter for one and a quarter inch eyepieces. This is the piece for the field flattener if you wanna use M42 camera. Okay, next up we have the Apertura 90 millimeter triplet. This one clocks in at 41 centimeters. With the field flattener in, it comes in at 4.8 kilograms. All right, the look is matte white. We have Apertura branded there. You have the Apertura A in the clamps here and the rings. And then we have these nice sort of bright blue accents. Like I said before, it has a Flaws-Mandy style plate. It does have some cutouts to reduce weight and plenty of holes all over it. On the top, we got a top handle, nice big substantial top handle. My hand fits just fine in there. And it's a multifunction top handle, meaning it's not just a handle. It also has some screw holes and a track here which you could screw things into by putting a screw in underneath. So you could put a clamp up here for a guide scope or even just screw a guide scope right on top. But it also has a Sinta-style finder shoe here on the Focuser. The Focuser does rotate 360. The rotation locking knob is right here on top. And on bottom, we have a tensioner locker thing here for the Focuser. It is a dual speed Focuser, nice and smooth. There's the gold geared track right there. Focuser seems really nice. There are a couple little screw holes here for adding an electronic Focuser. I didn't try that, but looks like it would be possible. And then we have markings for distance and repeatable focus up here on top. It goes out to 95 millimeters, that's the focus travel. So nice and long. Then here's the field flatener. It just screws right onto the back of the Focuser. I don't know what this thread is off hand. I think it might be like 63 millimeters, something like that. Back here though, you have your standard 48 millimeter threads and this piece comes off and there's a place to put in two inch filters right there. The Dew Shield does not have like a standard thumb screw locking knob. It does feel pretty tensioned though. So I don't know if you'd have any problem putting a flat panel on the front there. It also has these little micro screws here for maybe adjusting the tension of the Dew Shield. It has a metal front cap that's nice and tight, a little hard to take off. There's the front end. I don't know if you can see it, but it does have baffles. And the inside of the Dew Shield is a matte black for the most part. There's just a little bit of a shiny part up here at the front, but I think that would be fine. Okay, in addition to the field flatener, it also comes with this really cool little 32 millimeter guide scope with its own rings and finder base. Okay, and in terms of optional accessories, you can buy for it. There is a 0.8X reducer flatener. So if you want a little bit wider, faster option, there's this available for it. Another optional accessory is a two inch diagonal. So you can take off the flatener, put on the visual back, and then add this. And then to go with this two inch diagonal, you can get a two inch eyepiece from Apertura. This is a 26 millimeter, 70 degree field of view. So a nice wide eyepiece. And it comes in this very substantial case. Sort of reminds me of like a musician's case for an instrument. It does have keys if you wanna lock it. And you can put the whole telescope back in here. Don't have to take it apart or anything. It does fit back in here as long as you don't have a camera or anything else on there. By the way, here is the nice substantial visual back, which I haven't shown yet. So it can accept two inch or one and a quarter inch eyepieces. And it does have a nice smooth rotation on there as well. Okay, and then lastly, here's my discontinued Stellarview SVQ 86. It comes in at 46 centimeters. In the configuration I have it in here, it weighs 6.3 kilograms or 13 pounds, five ounces. I would describe this as a semi-gloss white. There's a few little red accents, but mostly just white and black. It does have a metal lens cap that comes off pretty easy. The Dew Shield does have a locking screw. I've actually broken my original locking screw and have been meaning to get a nice replacement, but for now it's just an M6 screw that I had lying around there that works fine for locking it down. Some baffles. And the inside of the Dew Shield is felt, black felt. Okay, it has nice substantial rings with some holes on the top for attaching stuff. And this is a unique thing that Stellarview offers. These are riser blocks. They're like solid metal riser blocks that are really nice. And the reason I really like those is if you get a filter wheel back here, it's really nice to be able to sort of rotate it in any direction and not have any sort of interference with the dovetail or anything else going on with your system. There's other reasons why these riser blocks are nice. You can put stuff underneath the telescope. So I've always liked these. They work pretty well. They don't seem to add too much instability to the system or anything. And then I had mine configured with a Los Mandi dovetail plate. You can see at this point, it's pretty well used. This is the scope that I have used by far the most. I don't know if you can see that, but this is 003. So this was the third one of this telescope ever produced. And I don't think they made that many. In terms of the focuser, you can see I don't have a locking or tensioning knob down here because I have added an electronic focuser. This is an Optech direct sink. And so the reason I like this one is because it has a little clutch. So you just turn it this way and then you can use the focuser manually. This is a three inch focuser that StellarView hand configured. It's very smooth, works very well. And then once you get sort of rough focus in, you just lock the direct sink by Optech and now it's ready for electronic focusing on the computer. It does have a Synthes style finder shoe right there. The rotation isn't on the entire focuser. Like the focus knobs don't move. The rotation is back here, which I prefer. It's a little bit rarer I find to get this, but I like it better this way because then the focus knobs stay always in the same position relative to the front of the telescope, but the whole camera system moves back here with this rotation knob right here. The connections are a little bit funky. There's, I think it's 82 millimeters up here. And then you can go from 82 to 63 to 54. That's what I have done here. And then this, what I have on here right now is a 54 millimeter Canon T-ring. A little bit rarer item. But the nice thing about that is if you want to use full frame on this telescope, there's absolutely no vignetting unless you introduce vignetting through your own spacers and adapters. So if you can find spacers and adapters that have a nice wide opening, this telescope itself isn't gonna introduce any vignetting because the bright image circle on this is something like 60 millimeters. This video is sponsored by Squarespace. I've been using Squarespace for my personal website, necocarver.com for over a year now, and I'm still amazed by how easy it is to use and manage a website with Squarespace. They provide the hosting and you can design the site however you wish with the included professional templates. There's nothing to download, nothing complex to learn because the website design system is completely intuitive and it updates live as you make any changes. So you can see exactly what your site is going to look like whether it's on desktop or mobile. If you're interested in having your own website with your own domain like mine, you can get a free trial at squarespace.com slash nebula photos. And after the free trial is over, if you like it, you can get 10% off your first purchase with the code nebula photos. Okay, now we're gonna move on to my favorite part which is the optical tests. And here are the tech details of how I conducted these optical tests of the telescopes. My target was M101, the pinwheel galaxy and it was a new moon, portal three sky. The mount was a Skywatcher EQ6R which can easily handle any of these telescopes. The camera was a crop sensor and ASI 2600MC that gained 100. And I did guide these with the ASI 290 mini and the William Optics 50 millimeter guide scope. I do five by five minute exposures here. So 25 minutes integration for each shot. Okay, and the reason I don't just do single exposures is because there's actually a few things. One is that there's a little bit more variability while you can sort of average that out with five by five minutes. Another thing is some optical things like chromatic aberration don't really show up very strongly in single exposures often or they're just hard to see unless you have a really trained eye while they are a bit more apparent if you get a little bit of integration going. Now I see it both ways. I see how some people want just the single exposures but this is the way that I've been doing it with these shootouts is doing small integrations to give you an idea of the optical performance. So starting with the SV48, here is just an integration of five subs and screen stretched. And what I'm trying to show here is just any vignetting that we can see in just a screen stretch. These are taken without any flats or calibration frames. So you can see the SV48 has maybe just a little bit of vignetting. It's a little bit more prominent on the Founder Optics 86 and I think that has to do with just the two inch field flatener and sort of the design of the focuser but this would definitely come out just fine with flats or even a background extraction. Okay, and then here is the Apertura 90 and this looks super flat, very nice field illumination on this telescope. Very impressive. And here is my stellar view 86 and it's somewhere in between, I guess, the Apertura 90 and the Founder Optics, maybe sort of similar to the SV Bony in terms of field illumination. Not a little bit of darkening of the corners but not too bad. But definitely the Apertura 90 wins in that regard. Okay, next up, what we're gonna be looking at is these were made with the Scripps Aberration Inspector under Image Analysis in Pixinsight. And what this does is it just simply takes little squares from the corners and the center and the edges of the photo to show you what the stars look like if we really zoom in on the corners. And so you can see with the SV Bony SV 48, the corners don't look too good and that is to be expected because I didn't use any field flatener but the center looks pretty nice other than a bit of chromatic aberration. Okay, and sort of there's a huge jump in quality here of course from $300 telescope to $1,400 telescope but I think this is pretty illustrative of what you can expect in terms of the increase in sharpness in the center and you get much tighter stars without any kind of chromatic aberration on them but also of course the corners and edge of a crop sensor are near perfect on the founder optics. Now I do get a little bit of star elongation mostly in this corner and maybe a little bit on this edge. So that looks like tilt to me. I thought I was pretty careful with the compression ring but maybe not as careful as I could have been. So just something to be maybe concerned with is there could be a little bit of tilt but you could use a tilt corrector or different kind of things to correct that out. Now let's compare this one to the Apertura 90. Okay, so the first thing you'll notice is that this one looks a lot brighter than this one because of the better field illumination across the chip for a crop sensor. These are not rotated exactly the same so don't pay attention to like trying to compare the stars directly but in both cases I think these star fields look really good. You know, the only thing that stands out really is just, yeah, that field illumination and a little bit of elongation from I think tilt on the founder optics but otherwise I think these look really well matched in terms of performance. So I'm gonna move this one over. This is the Apertura 90 and let's open up my stellar view. Okay, and this is a little bit wider field of view so we get more of the galaxy there in the center but again, I don't really see any issue with the stars here. Okay, next up I wanna show some processed shots meaning I went ahead and stretched them and applied some color saturation and if we look at the SV bony shot here, here's just a screen stretch and here's after I did some processing. What really stands out are these violet halos and that is just because this is an acromatic doublet. Now, if you don't wanna use a filter to get rid of those like a minus violet filter or a fringe killer filter, you can process those away in processing and so here's my attempt to do that. Now, you'll notice that when you do that, these, some of these big bright stars that have the really pronounced violet halo, the way that I sort of process them is just turning those stars basically white but it's very hard to completely get rid of that violet halo without leaving fairly large stars across the field but overall, I think this looks pretty good especially zoomed out like this. If we compare it to the founder Optics 86, I didn't get the black background quite right on this between the two but you can see that the orange stars come out a lot better and I think the sort of the overall impression is a little bit more impressive but they're actually closer than I thought they would be in terms of zoomed out like this. Here's the Apertura 90. I think this one with its larger aperture and slightly faster focal ratio gets just a slight edge but they're pretty close. I mean, they're very close in focal length. This is 540 millimeters, this is 560 millimeters so these two shots should look very similar and I think they do and then here is the StellarView SVQ 86. This is a wider shot so maybe not as appropriate for M101 but I think it held up pretty well. I like how the star colors came across. Ooh, I didn't get the background quite right on this one. It's a little bit red. I think the background looks most neutral in this one so my processing here isn't maybe perfect but this is just to give you an idea of what to expect after processing and just to show you that even the $300 telescope if you know what you're doing with processing can look quite good, I think. Okay, and then let's look at some center crops. Here we go. And not a huge amount to say here. I think these three, the $1,419 and $2,300 telescope all look very similar in terms of the amount of detail that we've gotten out of the galaxy. Of course, everything else is the same, the mount, the camera so you wouldn't expect a huge difference but I think these all look pretty identical. Now the $300 telescope is of course a little bit softer and then the main thing that's noticeable are these halos on the bright stars. I left those in for this comparison just to make it clear. You would have to deal with those in processing like I did here. But going back to this comparison what are we to make of these three results being so similar? Basically, it's that I think in terms of optical performance once you get to a certain level of telescope there's not gonna be huge differences if you have a similar aperture. So the main way I would choose between these three telescopes is the features and the price and what you're looking for. So for instance, of these three telescopes I would still keep my stellar view quad because I just really like quads. You don't have to mess around with back focus with a field flatner and there's a very convenient if you're happy with having that one focal length and don't really care about the option of having a reducer versus a flatner and different things like that. These two telescopes because they both have 1x flatners but also 0.8x reducers available it sort of gives you two focal lengths out of one telescope so you might like that flexibility. And then there's also differences in just sort of the mechanics and the look of the telescope all these kinds of things, the build quality the founder optics I thought was just a really impressive build quality for $1,400 but the aperture and the stellar view were also just really nice. So you really couldn't go wrong with any of these three telescopes. So it really just is sort of up to you of what you're looking for and those fine details in terms of the telescope design because I think optically any of these are gonna really do the job if you pair them with a good camera and mount. Two days after I started this comparison review which was again May 17th, this image right here we got word that a Japanese astronomer Koichi Itagaki sorry if I got the pronunciation wrong discovered a new supernova type two supernova bright supernova in M101. And so of course I got out that very night that I heard it had been discovered in Japan on May 19th and then night came later for me on the east coast of the US so I also captured it on May 19th the night it was discovered and there it is. It's very clearly just popped into view here on May 17th, you can't see it here on May 19th there it is. It was pretty small and not super bright on May 19th so congratulations to that Japanese astronomer for spotting something like that that's really cool. I don't think I would have even if I had captured M101 on that night I'm not sure if I would have been eagle eyed enough to discover that. But then here is what's really amazing I continued to capture M101 and just three nights later this is May 22nd look at how much brighter the supernova is this is a massive explosion. It's a red giant star that exploded in M101 and it's giving us quite the show here I mean look at this this is brighter than the core usually the core of a galaxy is going to be the brightest part of a galaxy but this supernova explosion 21 million light years away is actually brighter than the core of the galaxy it's as bright as stars in our own Milky Way that's how bright it is so this is definitely something that if you have a telescope or any kind of a telephoto lens even anything that's capable of capturing M101 you should go out and try capturing this because this is definitely like a lifer type event we don't get these kinds of super bright supernovas that often I think they said this is the closest one to us in a dozen years and so it's really cool to see something like this develop over just five days here from nothing to something that bright and the official designation is SN 2023 IXF and again you can find it in M101 which is pretty easy to spot in the night sky because it's right off the handle of the big dipper and I've actually done a video called how to photograph a galaxy with your DSLR that will go through the whole process of finding and capturing M101 and if you do it in the next couple months here you'll get this bonus of a supernova explosion now after a couple months it's gonna dim again and so you won't be able to see it anymore so it's something you have to go shoot this summer and I really encourage you to do so because you don't need a giant telescope to capture something this bright. 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 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 until next time this is Vanneco Carver, Clear Skies.