The SkyWatcher Esprit apochromatic refractors are in every respect in the premium category. Their optical and mount design is first class, providing unparalleled contrast and sharpness of image. Fine errors do not occur even at extreme magnifications.If the atmosphere permits, you can go beyond the theoretical maximum magnification and the image will not fall apart. Their performance puts the Esprit apo's in the league of market-leading competitors (e.g. Takahashi, Astrophysics, TEC).
The tube of the SkyWatcher Esprit 100/550 triplet apo package is still compact enough to be easily portable. It is equally well-suited for large-sky scanning, wide field-of-view deep sky photography, and observations requiring high magnification. You can break down globular clusters into tiny stars, see details in the brightest galaxies and gas clouds, and resolve close binaries. Saturn's ring with Cassini is an unforgettable sight, while Jupiter's clouds reveal the Great Red Spot and the many tiny eddies. The Moon is almost three-dimensional.
The soul of the Esprit apochromats is the triple (triplet) air slit objective lens, made from FPL-53 and Schott glass materials, which has SkyWatcher's most advanced anti-reflection coating. The two-piece field flattener designed for the lens, which screws onto the tube, provides a 43 mm distortion-free, flat field of view, making the telescope suitable for use with full frame (24x36) DSLR and CCD cameras. The image plane corrector is included in the package, which includes a Canon EOS M48 adapter ring. Object finding is made easy with an amici-prism 9x50 finder scope.
The rotatable 3" 1:10 focusing eyepiece allows for extremely fine, precise focusing and produces vignetting-free images. The edge blends inside the tube significantly reduce light scatter, resulting in a highly contrasty image. The long dew cap also protects the lens in humid weather. The prismatic lens is Losmandy standard, so it can be easily mounted on the new HEQ-5 and larger mounts.
