....If you can call getting roasted by the sun "first light."
Anyhow I finally had everything together, the 2x powermate, the 4x powermate, the right little 12 v power plug, the right wire, the UVIR, it was all here.
So I pulled out the G11 and put my Vixen dovetail adapter on it, and mounted the Vixen ED81S (which is 81mm f/7.7).
Bad stuff first.
1. My main mechanical complaint is that the 2" adapter to hold 2" eyepieces is very poorly made. The eyepieces keep hanging up on the brass strip. It might break in with time, but I haven't had this issue before and I've used my fair share of diagonals and 2" adapters.
2. The instructional pamphlet insists that you need 32 to 40mm TV 1.25" plossls, which strikes me as a rather narrow recommendation. The Pentaxes performed very well. It is possible though that the pincushion etc. that you get from Pan Optics and Naglers might not blend well with the quark.
3. My ED81S does not have enough in-focus for all this stuff. When I switched from the 4x to the 2x powermate, with the powermate positioned between diagonal and quark, I could not get to focus no matter what eyepiece I used. Eventually my friend and I decided to put the 2x powermate, with the UVIR on it, *in front* of the diagonal. I'm not sure this is a Daystar issue (the lack of in-focus) but it leaves me wondering how well this gear will do on my 102mm f/6.5.
4. You put a 40mm eyepiece in the adapter which sits on the quark which sits in the barlow which is in the diagonal, you got a lot of torque. The visual back of the refractor was tending to twist off, but I found that if I took the whole eyepiece barlow combination and did a complete clockwise rotation the whole assembly tightened up (the visual back was unscrewing out of the focus tube). There was also the issue of tightening up the screws that held the diagonal to keep it from rotating inside the visual back and that took a bit of torque too. But it all held.
5. It gets to be a little complicated moving the powermates around and making sure the UVIR is always first in the optical train. It's not a very elegant solution.
That's it on the bad stuff--that's not so bad, was it?
Good stuff
1. With the UVIR on the diagonal I was expecting the refractor to become an inferno. It did not. In fact, the white refractor was cooler to the touch than the black Losmandy mount.
2. The views were stunning. I really didn't expect them to be this good. Well, I don't know what I was expecting. But it was quite a treat to see several large prominences.
3. There was surface detail too. Around the sunspots (there were four groups that I recall) I could see the grayish lines or filaments, one with a counter clockwise swirl to it. It was quite entrancing.
4. Now we put the 2x powermate on, as mentioned above, and with it between diagonal and quark there was insufficient in-focus. When transposed, there was insufficient out-focus. Fortunately it was easy to solve the problem by pulling the powermate out about 1/2 inch and locking it there. The other advantage of this system is it pulls the powermate out of the high-torque position mentioned above and so now you have the quark in the diagonal and the eyepiece in the quark, which shortens everything up four or five inches and reduces the leverage. So it has its advantages, even though it's not a recommended position for the power mate.
5. My friends preferred the 2x powermate view with low-ish magnification. They said it was easier to reach focus with a daytime pupil. You got a full disk view with prominences plainly visible. If you looked carefully around the sunspots you could see some surrounding structure. Nonetheless....
6. Exactly as the Daystar people had said, the 4x powermate delivered the more contrasty views. You don't get full disk but the prominence structure was outstanding. And you could see a pattern of small dark lines all over the sun, a kind of crust, and the sun spots showed great detail with their network of filaments extending out. There were, furthermore, the long irregular shapes that I have been told, in the past, are prominences seen from the top. So I think the 4x powermate view with the 30mm Pentax XW is my preferred optical train. It just showed so much fine detail around the sunspots, and the prominences looked like they were sewn out of fine delicate lace (except for the one that looked like a nuclear bomb mushroom cloud).
But my friends were of the opinion that for outreach it would be better to use the 4x Barlow and the 40mm XW, because it would be easier for novices to acquire the image. So there you have it. I guess it's the sort of thing where if you have a long line you go for the easy view, but if it's just a few people, you can coach them to the more detailed image.
All told this was a great experience. One of my friends had trouble pulling in the finer detail and seemed convinced that the thing to do was put the whole assembly on the four inch. Well, a chance to try that will come on down the line.
Anyhow I never thought I'd be able to see prominences and H-alpha structure on the sun for less than about $5k of outlay, so the combo quark and its ability to work with the 2x and 4x powermates for $1800 (about $1200 goes to Daystar, $600 to TV for the powermates) is quite a bargain. Furthermore, I was observing at 81mm and have the option to go up to 102mm (and even further if I want to buy large aperture ERFs) which strikes me as a very good deal given the number of people who seem to be using 40 and 50mm H-alpha scopes.
I feel much better about all this outlay now that I know it works....and works really well!
Greg N
p.s. I think someone posted here that the combo quark chromosphere didn't show prominences. That's not what they tell you at Daystar when you call, and I can now vouch for them: the chromosphere does a humdinger job on prominences. Maybe photographers need the prominence version, but this is a terrific all around visual tool for surface detail and prominences. I wonder if the 4" refractor will bring in even more details.
