Excelsis Ratings/Reviews - Votes:Astro-Physics Starfire 178 f/9

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Astro-Physics Starfire 178 f/9

I have owned one of the later Astro-Physics Starfire 178 f/9 scopes now for over 10 years. It was one of the last non-ED scopes made in 1991 and is Air-Spaced (all but the last few were oil-spaced). The scope performs as a much larger scope in most respects. On the best nights I have had the scope up over 600x on the planets/moon and had no breakdown in the images. Jupiter's moons are disks in my 7mm eyepiece and both myself and a friend of mine swear that we spotted the moon Himalia in the eyepiece on a great night of seeing with extremely steady air. As far as color correction is concerned I have not noticed any color on any object including Sirius and Venus. The late Thomas Back stated in A Brief History of Astro Physics Lenses "In the last production runs of the larger non-ED StarFires, he airspaced the design and also allowed the six different radii to vary on each surface. These last production StarFires' were almost the match of the current ED Astro-Physics scopes" IMHO this is right on the mark. Best scope I have ever owned in my 50+ years of amateur astronomy. And I have owned many refractors over the years including Takahashi's, TMB and other Astro-Physics scopes.

Overall Rating: 10
Optics:10 Ease of Use:10
Weight: 1 (Unreliable Vote)
Date: 04/03/2017 08:48:45 pm PST
By: Anonymous (xxx.xxx.48.133)
Link to this vote: http://www.excelsis.com/1.0/displayvote.php?voteid=614435

Reply Replies: 0

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