Corrected Astrograph - Lightweight Telescope - Lightweight Optical Support Structure Elliptical Secondary, Elliptical Flat, Elliptical Secondary, Elliptical Mirror

"I went to bed at about 10PM and I let it run all night without focusing. I blinked through the images and focus did not change. Also, I did all of my other images by letting it run through the night without focusing."

- Mel Helm, Sierra Remote Observatories, 16" f3.75 Dream Astrograph owner

Test out of another 16" f3.75 Dream Astrograph - Filter Air System Technology (FAST)

The focal plane evaluation shown to the right was created using CCD Inspector. It shows the symmetry and quality of the field of a 16" f3.75 Dream Astrograph that was tested in April of 2010 in Dream's observatory. The telescope was extensively tested over four nights. Shane Santi performs these tests personally for every telescope Dream produces. The detector used was a KAI-11002 chip: 9µm pixels, 4008 x 2672 (42mm diagonal).

Click on either of the CCDI graphics to download the raw FITS file.

Collimation of this and all of the Dream Astrograph telescopes is achieved by using the collimation kit provided with each telescope. Collimation of the telescopes is done during the day. No collimation adjustments are needed night. The proper use of the collimation tools and the design features of the Dream Astrograph telescopes eliminates the need for the highly non-intuitive collimation adjustment of the telescope optics based on camera images at night.

Dream and our customers have also found through empirical test results that our state of the art telescopes not only hold focus across temperature changes but the telescopes hold collimation across the entire sky. This is a huge accomplishment for a system that has a best focus that is only 16µm wide, when used on equatorial mounts (compound telescope angle changes) and with large detectors.

"Within a temperature range of 10 degrees C we see no measurable change in focus. Also, there was no change in focus as a function of telescope position. All thanks to rigid carbon fiber."

- Michael Schwartz, Tenagra Observatories, 16" f3.75 Dream Astrograph owner.