| This Coronado SolarMax 60 is a brass and black 400mm focal length 60mm aperture f/6.6 refractor with a built-in sub-Ångstrom Hydrogen-Alpha solar filter. It has been optimized for visual and photographic imaging of activity on both the solar disk and the Sun’s limb. Prominences leaping off the edges of the solar disk, the explosive upheavals of flares on the face of the Sun, the low contrast mottling of granulation across the face of this nearest of stars, all are captured vividly by this premium-quality solar scope.
The scope’s custom-designed achromatic doublet lens uses special multi-layer antireflection coatings on all air-to-glass surfaces to optimize anti-ghosting and improve contrast. These vacuum-deposited hard coatings will provide a long lifetime of detailed solar observing. The scope delivers both diffraction-limited optical performance and the extremely high contrast needed to see both subtle surface details and the full explosive power of flares and prominences. With 50% higher resolution than a 40mm solar scope, and more than twice a 40mm’s light gathering area, the SolarMax 60 can show subtle details and contrast shadings simply invisible in any smaller scope.
The two-piece solar filter consists of a full-aperture 60mm etalon in front of the objective lens and a 10mm clear aperture blocking filter in the scope’s 1.25” star diagonal. The solar filter has a <0.7 Ångstrom passband, centered on the 6562.8 Ångstrom H-Alpha line. The sub-Ångstrom passband width gives you an ideal balance between the visibility of prominences versus disk features. The filter is thermally stable, so there is essentially no drifting off the H-Alpha line as the filter heats up during use. (Thermal stability is 0.005Å per degree Centigrade.) The 10mm clear aperture of the blocking filter portion of the H-Alpha system built into the star diagonal is matched in size to the focal length of the telescope to give you full disk views of the Sun.
The SolarMax 60 has a manual 1.25” drawtube that extends for rough focusing. A helical focusing ring around the drawtube then provides the appropriate final fine focusing. This method provides enough back focus to allow both visual observing and afocal imaging. The 10mm blocking filter aperture allows you to use a Barlow in front of the SolarMax 60’s blocking filter/diagonal. This makes digital photography easier and allows the use of a binoviewer with the SolarMax.
A T-Max passband tuner is installed between the solar filter etalon and the objective lens. This lets you mechanically tilt the filter’s passband off the H-Alpha line to observe Doppler-shifted solar activity. This will let you determine whether Doppler-shifted features, such as flares, are moving towards you or away from you as they leap off the surface of the Sun. For more details, click on the “T-Max” icon above.
A 25mm (16x) Coronado CEMAX eyepiece is standard equipment with the SolarMax 60. This eyepiece, like all the Coronado CEMAX eyepieces, uses a proprietary anti-reflection multicoatings formula that has been optimized for the highest possible contrast during solar viewing of subtle prominence and surface detail. For closer views of solar disk details, you might consider adding a 12mm (33x) and/or 18mm (22x) CEMAX eyepiece to your system. For still higher power views, consider also adding the Coronado CEBAR 2x Barlow to your system. Like the CEMAX eyepieces, its performance and coatings are optimized for solar observing.
You can also use most 1.25” eyepieces in your collection with the Coronado SolarMax 60. Any good quality 50° field Plössl will work well, as a Plössl’s contrast is generally good and its field wide and flat. For optimum solar detail, however, the Coronado CEMAX eyepieces have a small, but visible, solar viewing contrast advantage over a conventional eyepiece designed for nighttime deep space observing.
A hard carrying case is standard equipment to transport and store the SolarMax 60. The scope comes with a clamshell tube mounting ring that allows you to mount the reasonably lightweight (6 lb.) scope on most altazimuth and equatorial astronomical mounts. An optional Coronado Sol Ranger Sun Finder is available to make it easy to center the Sun’s image in the eyepiece. The Sol Ranger connects to the SolarMax 60’s clamshell mounting ring.
The SolarMax 60 can be “double stacked" by adding a second SolarMax 60 filter and T-Max to the front of the existing filter. Double filtering improves the scope’s already outstanding <0.7 Ångstrom performance by cutting the passband to a very narrow <0.5 Ångstrom. This improves contrast on very subtle disk features. Two factory-matched “double-stacked” versions of the SolarMax 60 are available at lower prices (and with somewhat higher performance) than simply adding a separate second 60mm filter and the appropriate adapters to the scope yourself at a later date.
One is the #SM60105, which adds a factory-matched internal 40mm etalon to the standard SolarMax 60 single external etalon scope. The smaller size, and consequently lower cost, of the 40mm internal etalon keeps the price of this dual etalon scope considerably below that of adding a complete second 60mm external etalon.
The second scope, the #SM6010DS, is a true double-stack model that adds a second factory-matched external 60mm etalon to the standard SolarMax 60. The cost is almost the same as adding a second 60mm external etalon yourself separately at a later date, but the factory matching of the etalons provides higher performance than simply adding an unmatched etalon yourself later. | 
Email page link to a friend
