today's video is sponsored by squarespace  this is the new Askar fra 300 pro the fra  

in the title of this telescope stands for  flat field refractive astrograph and for  

anyone that hasn't heard that term astrograph  it means a telescope specifically designed for  

astrophotography rather than for  visual use like with an eyepiece  

now we can usually adapt a visual telescope into  one more fitting for astrophotography by adding on  

a field corrector like a field flattener if it's a  refractor or a coma corrector if it's a reflector  

but if you're designing a telescope from scratch  specifically for astrophotography then it totally  

makes more sense to design these flat fielding  correcting last elements right into the design  

of the telescope which is why this is a quintuplet  meaning there's five pieces of glass inside the  

tube here which of course makes this telescope  fairly heavy for its size but the idea is that  

we won't need to buy anything additional with  this telescope to get a flat well-corrected  

field for astrophotography and for that reason and  also because they're more of a specialty product  

astrographs are typically very expensive but this  one the askar fra 300 pro is very competitively  

priced at just 949 us dollars so i thought  it'd be interesting to see how it performs and  

in this review i'll be putting this telescope  through its paces and seeing how it stacks up  

with another popular small telescope i have  here this is the william optics redcat 51.  

hi everyone this is nico carver and this  is a review so first some disclaimers  

both uh the askar fra 300 and this redcat 51 were  sent to me free of charge for the purpose of video  

reviews the redcat 51 from wo boys which is the  u.s online store for williams optics telescopes  

and the askar from askar directly but with  assistance from agena astro products none of  

these companies have any input into what i say  into this or any future video on these products  

and no money has changed hands these companies  may choose to share my youtube video or my photos  

taken with the products on their website or social  media but that's completely up to them throughout  

this video i'll be comparing the askar fra 300 to  the william optics redcat51 because i see them as  

competitors in that they have fairly similar specs  the redcat is also an astrograph meaning the field  

flattening elements are built in it's a quadruplet  it has a front aperture of 51 millimeters a focal  

length of 250 millimeters so that gives it a focal  ratio of f 4.9 the askar on the other hand has a  

front aperture of 60 millimeters a focal length of  300 millimeters so that gives it a focal ratio of  

f5 so f 4.9 versus f5 but this one's a little bit  longer so they're very similar in a lot of ways  

you're going to get a slightly different field of  view askar did say they added pro to the end of  

this title because this is an f5 scope while their  other fra telescopes the 400 the 500 and the 600  

are f5.6 astrographs and that small improvement  is important for uh photographs because that extra  

half stop of light means that the photos will  be brighter faster and that's why focal ratio  

is sometimes referred to as photographic speed  especially if you come from the world of lenses  

and it means that with a faster telescope one  with a smaller f number which remember is a  

ratio you can take shorter exposures but it also  means your signal-to-noise ratio will be better  

compared to a slower scope if we're talking the  same total integration okay on to the comparisons  

in terms of weight with a vixen plate a ring  and a top handle installed the red cat weighs  

1.8 kilograms or just over 4 pounds while the fra  300 weighs 3.4 kilograms or 6 pounds 11 ounces the  

red cap package includes a soft carry case but  no top handle for a guide scope if you do want  

a top handle it costs 50 extra dollars the fra  300 does not include a carry case but is well  

equipped otherwise because it has both a top  handle and a synta style finder shoe attachment  

and so for astrophotography i think most people  would put the guide scope on up top here something  

like this and then with this finder shoe maybe  put like an asi air or something like that or a  

power bank something that would be useful right  there for all the cable connections in terms of  

focusers the askar has this more traditional uh  2.5 inch rack and pinion design focuser with a  

single speed knob on this side and a double speed  knob on the other side this red knob here is a 10  

to 1 reduction which is very nice if you manually  focus like i have been with these telescopes  

if you do want to add an autofocuser the bottom  has mounting holes already for adding something  

like a zwo electronic autofocus or eaf if you want  to add auto focusing to the red cat with the zwo  

af you'll need to buy a pulley system i have  this excellent one sent to me by deep sky dad  

and the reason you need a pulley system is because  the red cat has a helical focuser like this like  

your camera lens i have heard that in version two  of the red cat that it's slightly different that  

this front element doesn't go in and out when you  move the focus ring but that it is still a helical  

focuser both telescopes have a locking device for  locking the focus this one right here this one  

underneath as well as a knob for manual rotation  which is very handy on the red cat it's right here  

and on the fra it's right there and i love  having a little locking mechanism for a  

manual rotator it's much better than having  to like rotate the whole telescope in its ring  

um it's much handier and works much better and  i'm really big into picking my rotation angle so  

that's a really good feature of both telescopes  in terms of mounts for these telescopes if you're  

pairing them with a lightweight dslr or mirrorless  camera or one shot color astronomy camera i think  

you could go with basically any uh mount including  this new sky watcher star adventure gti uh if  

you're using a mono camera with filter wheel like  i have here the red cat would be the safer bet  

because you'd be well under the weight limit of  the gti but it actually amused me that the fra  

300 with this qhy 533m and a full filter wheel  this kit that i have exactly right here put me  

right at the payload limit of five kilograms for  the gti so i actually haven't had a chance to try  

out this exact combo yet but i intend to because  i actually think this would be a really awesome  

lightweight sort of travel setup before i show  some various photo results and star tests done  

with both telescopes i'd like to tell you about  the sponsor for today's video which is squarespace  

squarespace is an all-in-one platform for creating  and hosting websites and i've been through the  

process of setting up websites before and i  can tell you that squarespace just makes it all  

so much easier than what i had to do before it's  actually so easy to use squarespace's site builder  

and professional portfolios that i put  together my revamped nicocarver.com  

website from scratch in under an hour and i just i  love how it looks it i think it looks very elegant  

and it was just so easy that i got it done  so whether you're a photographer wanting to  

have your own beautiful portfolio  with your own domain name like me  

or a small business wanting to sell basically  anything online services products digital products  

squarespace has you covered and you can use the  link in the description which is squarespace.com  

nebula photos to get your free trial and if  you like what you see with squarespace which  

i think you will use the code nebula  photos for 10 off your first purchase  

so next up is what i'm sure many of you really  want to see which is how do these scopes compare  

when it comes to a star field and a full-frame  camera so i shot a three minute guided  

exposure with match settings on the canon eos  ra on both telescopes on the same object which  

is the blue horse head nebula here and i shot  uh this within like a 10 minute window so there  

wasn't much time between these two exposures so i  think it's a pretty fair comparison on the stars  

and this is the full field with the redcat this  on the right is the full field with the fra  

300 and the first thing you'll probably notice is  that it's a different crop or you know or it's a  

different field of view i should say uh the fra  300 is a little bit tighter in than the red cat  

but that's understandable since the red cat has  a focal length of 250 and the fra 300 it's 300  

millimeters the other thing that really stands out  from just a single exposure that's not calibrated  

is that the red cat has pretty significant fall  off vignetting in the corners while it's pretty  

well illuminated in the fra300 so you can  see that's pretty noticeable fall off here  

while on the fra 300 you can see it gets  a little darker in the corners but not  

not as bad but that fall off in the corner is  not really going to impact your astrophotography  

that much unless you don't shoot flats but i  always shoot flats and so after full calibration  

of these two frames they look quite different like  this and so you can see here now they're looking  

a little bit more similar both very flat and  i don't you know i've looked at the corners  

and i know that the theory is that you're going  to have much worse signal-to-noise ratio when  

you have that much light fall off but i don't  know i've looked in the corners of these  

shots and i don't really see a huge difference  in the noise at least visually so that gives  

you a sense of that next up let's look at some  stars really zoomed in so for this i'm going to

go into image analysis

aberration inspector

and run this on both shots here okay and  there we go and at first glance to my eye  

i mean these both look quite good i don't really  see you know glaring uh problems with the stars  

but let's go ahead and zoom in on the center  here okay um you know they're both what we call  

under sampled so it was zoomed in this far this  is probably like 400 zoom you can see a little  

bit of uh blockiness to the stars like they're  not you could you start to get a little bit of  

pixelation or whatever um but they they both look  fine i don't see a huge difference in sharpness um  

let's look at the corners now okay so

this left upper left corner i can think i can  see just a little bit more chromatic aberration  

a little bit of like red separation on that star  um but unfortunately these aren't like perfectly  

matched fields so i don't uh have that same star  here to compare like a big star right on the edge  

uh so i don't know if that's the best comparison  but i think i see a little bit of red fringe  

there while on the red cat stars i don't really  see much of anything now i mean this level of  

chromatic aberration wouldn't bother me  i don't think but it might bother some  

people so i just that's why i'm noting it yeah  and i think you know here let's see if there's a

okay so here's a fairly good test like that's a  bright star fairly close to the edge there's a  

bright star fairly close to the edge and i i  still feel like i see just a little bit more  

of that like blue and red um separation here  with the ascar than i do with the red cat  

but let's keep looking so in this corner this is  the bottom right corner the star shapes look a  

little bit um off on the red cat and a little bit  more circular a little bit more round on the ascar  

there could be a tilt issue there so it might not  be the optics fault let's go to the upper right  

corner yeah same thing in the upper right  corner a little bit not as extreme as that  

that bottom right corner but in the upper  right corner i see a little bit more um

malformed stars on the red cat that i do  on the ascar i think but you know what this  

is all sort of nitpicking because i think all  of these stars look very good um i'm you know  

i'm suitably impressed that these are 250 and 300  millimeter focal length on full-frame camera that  

i think these are both quite impressive uh for  you know scopes that are under a thousand dollars  

i don't i don't know what other people think  but uh for me this this is a very impressive  

performance uh to wrap up here i i haven't had  the best luck with weather with this scope yet  

um but i did get this finished image done here  at home in somerville this is with the qhy 533  

m mono camera and a hydrogen alpha filter  and an oxygen three filter and it's just  

eight uh exposures with the h a filter and five  exposures with the o3 filter so not a lot of data  

um but it just i think it shows you the potential  of pairing the fra 300 with the 533m uh it's an  

interesting combination i think i think a good  combination of gear i i just think this this  

field of view 300 millimeters with that one-inch  square sensor is going to work well for a lot  

of these sort of nebula scenes like the jellyfish  here with the extended uh nebulosity and the two  

bright stars in in gemini and uh you can see that  i don't see any issues with you know star haloing  

or anything like that with that's with this setup  so uh hopefully this review of the askar fra 300  

was helpful and if you have any questions  you can always leave them in the comments  

and i'll try to answer them all until next  time this has been nico carver clear skies