Paracorr Type-2: Imaging the Skies with Luca Marinelli

This week’s guest blog post is by Luca Marinelli. He images the sky with a Teleskop Service ONTC 10″ Carbon Tube f/4 Newtonian equipped with our Tele Vue Paracorr Type 2 coma corrector.

I have been interested in photography since a very young age. I remember learning to take pictures with my father’s Russian-made Zenit-E 35mm fully-manual SLR (you had to remember to close the iris by hand before shooting to set the desired aperture!) when I was in elementary school. I have pursued nature and adventure photography ever since and some of my images have been published.

I am a physicist and, professionally, I am a different kind of imager: I develop technologies for brain MRI at GE Research. In graduate school, I had friends in the astrophysics and astronomy departments, but I never formally studied astronomy. Almost two years ago, for my oldest son’s fourth birthday, my wife and I decided that it would be fun to get a little telescope as a present for him. I looked around and bought a Celestron NexStar 102SLT. The moment I put my eye on the wobbly eyepiece I was hooked. Immediately I decided to try and connect my DSLR to it. Of course, it didn’t work. I couldn’t even balance it. That didn’t deter me, I bought an equatorial mount and started pointing my camera lenses to the sky. Of course, shortly after a real imaging telescope was next and the rest, as they say, is history.

Paracorr Type 2
has been an
invaluable
component of my
imaging train.
Stars are always
tight and round,
with no discernible
aberrations.

After imaging for about a year with a 4″ refractor, I wanted to get more reach for smaller targets and higher resolution. After considering several optical designs, I ordered a carbon tube fast 10” Newtonian astrograph from Teleskop-Service in Germany. After many conversations with experienced imagers, and poring over images on Astrobin.com, I decided that I didn’t want to “walk the steps” up the quality ladder for coma correctors and went straight for the top! The Tele Vue Paracorr Type 2 has been an invaluable component of my imaging train. Stars are always tight and round, with no discernible aberrations. Furthermore, it is fairly forgiving of the exact spacing to the sensor, allowing me to optimize the rotation of the sensor relative to the off-axis guider for different cameras. It doesn’t require sub-mm optimization of the spacing from the field lens to the sensor of the camera either, which is a huge time saver when swapping cameras. I prefer to spend my time collecting data than fiddling with tiny spacers.

Luca images from primarily from his backyard outside of Albany, NY. He is a member of the Albany Area Amateur Astronomers. This October he will give a presentation to the club on astrophotography and what we can learn about the Universe from our images. When the telescope doesn’t have a camera attached to it, Luca’s whole family now enjoys observing the sky through Tele Vue Nagler and Ethos eyepieces on the 10” Newt.

Did you observe, sketch, or image with Tele Vue gear? We’ll like your social media post on that if you tag it #televue and the gear used. Example:
televue #paracorr #horseheadnebula #barnard33

Do you want your Tele Vue images re-posted on Tele Vue Optics’ Social Media accounts? Use this hashtag for consideration:
#RPTVO

• Tele Vue Paracorr Type 2 coma corrector (mobile version)
• Tele Vue BIG Paracorr Type 2 coma corrector (mobile version)
• Read Paracorr’s role in the New Dobsonian Revolution (PDF) article from Astronomy Magazine
• Luca Marinelli’s Twitter feed: @BikesNPhotos
• More Paracorr Type-2 blog posts with 10″ f/3.8,  10″ f/4 (with BIG Paracorr T2),  and  10″ f/4.65. 
• Technote: Using Bino Vue with Paracorr