Takahashi FS-102 NSV

5.0 Excellent Quality/Incredible Views

Lightweight; Bright, color-free views even with high power; Extremely well built.

No longer made; Not short enough! Expensive!!

The Takahashi FS-102 NSV is a great scope that is only 28 inches long with dewshield retracted and weighs about 11 pounds for the OTA only. It has a front lens element of Calcium Fluorite. This helps keep false color to a very faint level even at VERY high magnifications. When more "normal" high magnification is used on the moon or planets, there is no false color detectable. The fact that it is a Doublet also helps keep the weight down, and should help provide slightly brighter views than a triplet objective could produce. The focuser is "buttery-smooth" and makes it relatively easy to find focus. It makes an excellent "quick-look" scope. For photography, it does have some field curvature, but the Tak focal reducer/field flattener can help deal with this and also reduce exposure times (but it does cost about $500!). I do astrophotography with the scope at f/8 and just crop the image.

Now the bad news:
It's no longer available!

Even though it is the "Short" version, it is still not short enough to use inexpensive binoviewers (Burgess optical, Orion, William Optics) with a 2" diagonal but WITHOUT the barlow for low power, wide angle views of star fields. You have to order some parts from Borg (a telescope manufacturer) that will replace the Tak visual back and allow you to reach focus without the correcting lens or barlow that usually comes with these inexpensive (but well-made) binoviewers.

You also cannot collimate the scope yourself (thankfully Takahashi rarely gets this wrong).

Calcium fluorite is sensitive to rapid, extreme temperature changes, which can cause the crystal to break. I have had my scope out in freezing weather and then brought it inside to an ambient temperature of 50 to 60 degrees WITHOUT any ill effects. Apparently, it will survive these kinds of moderate temp changes.

In the world of telescopes, if you can't see false color, then in my opinion it is an APO, but there are other APOs available today that use ED glass like FPL-53 which come close to the color correction of Calcium Fluorite, but are cheaper to make and more durable (although in normal use calcium fluorite should be okay).

In short, you won't be disappointed with this scope, no matter what you use it for! And if you don't have the money for one, there are other scopes that are pretty much just as "color-free" for less money and make their owners very happy.