Skywatcher Skyhawk-1145P - Newtonian telescope 114/500 mm on EQ1

Written by Eduardo Carcole
on 2022-07-21

This a fantastic telescope with really good optics. I use it for astrophotography with a light planetary camera and the performance is far beyond my expectations. The mount EQ1 I never used it.

The weak point of this telescope (and other telescopes with similar prices) is the focuser. It has a lot of play and when using the camera it is difficult to get the exact focus. I solved the problem replacing internal nylon strips by thicker ones and gluing a bigger flat wheel to gain double precision while focusing. Using a Bahtinov mask I have been able to reach focus in less than one minute and to keep stable during hours of exposures.

When using plate solving software, it reported that the actual focal length of my telescope was not 500mm, but 450mm. This means that my unit is an F4 telescope. I verified later on using tape meter! This explains I had some visible coma in my images and I was able to take "good" pictures of galaxies and nebula with very short exposures, usually less than 30 seconds. This allowed me to use my "cheap" alt-azimuth mount, an Skywatcher SynScan AZ GOTO to take some "wonderful" pictures of deep space objects.

Conclusion: It is a wonderful telescope with a cheap plastic focuser that needs some simple work to use it for astrophotography with a light planetary camera. My unit is an F4 with a real focal length of 450mm, which just a wonderful thing. If you want to see pictures taken with this telescope please visit my webpage: http://cosmolinux.no-ip.org/Maksutov/maksutov.html#8