Sky-Watcher 25th Anniversary Limited-Edition SkyMax 127 Virtuoso GTI
$775.00

A complete and capable tabletop telescope.

One of the biggest problems with telescope ownership is many people often get a scope that is suitably impressive and capable but takes a bit of time to setup for use. The best telescope you have is the one you actually use right?

Telescope on a table — The Virtuoso GTI anniversary package comes with everything you see here and is ready to go.

I have a pretty impressive collection of telescopes myself, various optical designs, several different mounts, some even small, portable, and easy to setup. Yet, I will very often find myself taking out the trash or coming home from an evening engagement and noticing that the sky is clearer than I expected it to be that night. The Moon/Jupiter/Saturn/etc. looks fantastic tonight, it’s too bad I don’t have scope setup and ready to go. This happens more often than it should. Years ago, I bought a simple small tabletop Dobsonian, mostly for my children at the time, but unlike my current 14” dob, it didn’t track, didn’t have GOTO, and was unsuitable for astrophotography. I ended up giving it to my daughter when she got married and moved out. Occasionally, when my favorite visual target the Moon surprises me one night, I’ve missed that little scope. Well, I used to.

For Sky-Watcher’s 25 anniversary, they have released a limited number of SkyMax 127 telescopes with the Virtuoso GTI mount. They sent me one for review, and it’s a keeper. The included optic is a 127mm Mak-Cassegrain with a focal length of 1,500mm and a focal ratio of f/11.8. I love the Mak-Cass design and own the larger 180mm version myself. The optical design has many advantages for visual astronomy as well as astrophotography. In the many years I’ve had the larger one and transported it around, I’ve only had to tweak the collimation one time, and the truth is, I probably should have left it alone. It’s not quite as good as a refractor (sorry, I’m a bit of a refactor fanatic), but it’s close in terms of sharpness and contrast, it’s far more portable and provides superior views of the Moon and planets to a Schmidt Cassegrain for its size. For the anniversary edition, the 127 OTA has a special insignia on it and each one is numbered as well. Fancy.

Scope on a tripod — Quick and easy setup in my driveway on a tripod!

Although, the Virtuoso GTI is a tabletop mount, it also has a 3/8” threaded block on the bottom for mounting on a tripod if you want it elevated. I found this to be a surprisingly useful feature. The whole thing weighs just 21 pounds too. The Virtuoso is an Alt-Az mount with a Vixen style dovetail clamp. You could easily remove the SkyMax OTA and put on another telescope as long as it was short and lightweight (10 pounds or less). A small refractor for example would do nicely here. The GTI creates its own WIFI hotspot and can be controlled with Sky-Watcher’s free SynScan app, which is available for both iOS and Android mobile devices. If you have or purchase separately a SynScan hand controller, there is also a port for that as well. I do confess, I sometimes prefer to have that tactile feel of real buttons while I float above the Moon with my eye glued to the eyepiece, and I’m pleased this scope offers that option.

Side view of Virtuoso — Like most Sky-Watcher mounts, the Virtuoso GTI sports a hand controller port, power port via batteries or an AC power brick, and has a snap port for controlling a camera.

It’s a tracking mount, which means it needs power. There’s the ubiquitous 2.1mm power port for a 12v power supply, or you can add eight AA batteries for a more cord free experience. I found alignment to be trivially simple. There are clutches on both axes you can loosen for easy OTA positioning. Just level the mount, point the OTA north, and connect with the SynScan app or hand controller. I most often use it for a single target opportunity, and the one-star alignment gets me close enough to the Moon for example that I can find and center it up well enough with the included 9×50 straight-through finder scope. Tracking is good, and there are options for setting both lunar and solar tracking rates (be sure and use a FRONT MOUNTED SOLAR FILTER). I appreciated the 2” diagonal and back on the 127 SkyMax as I can use it with my entire eyepiece collection.

Some of my finer scopes I keep indoors, but I can’t just take them outside and use them on a spur because in Florida the optics will immediately gather condensation in the warm humid air outside after being in my air-conditioned home. This setup however, I keep in my shed and have been up and running and exploring the Moon in literally under 5 minutes. There is an included 28mm eyepiece in this package, but I also found the views are quite nice with my Takahashi and Brandon eyepieces, and when seeing conditions are good, I’ve pushed the magnification up to over 300x. Yes, I know that exceeds the maximum recommended for an optic this size, but your brain is an amazing image processing device too, and you’d be surprised what you can see sometimes.

Another reason I’m so fond of this setup is that there’s very limited sky from my back yard. When the Moon is behind the neighbors’ trees, I can pop this on a tripod in my driveway, spend a few minutes lost in the Moon’s terrain, and then put it away quickly before bed. I can even extend setup time to a whopping 10 minutes<g>, by grabbing my laptop and a high-speed camera to do some lucky imaging since it’s a tracking mount.

Some quick lucky imaging has never been more convenient than with a ready to go system that I can plop down anywhere.

I really have no critique of this package. It’s small, light, fast to setup, and it’s bringing me back to my favorite target the Moon when the opportunity strikes. Sure, I can do a little better with one of my larger scopes, but “more frequent” is also a pretty compelling feature! It’s also a great scope for the planets, and brighter deep sky objects, but for me it’s going to primarily be my “Moon Ship”. I name all my scopes, and this one I’ve christened as “Artemis”. You can probably guess why.

Richard S. Wright Jr. does not have more telescopes than he needs, no matter what his friends and family says. He also does not have too many books on the Moon, and is always looking for more at used book stores.

Image of Player One camera — I think we are going to make beautiful music together….

I plan to do a longer and more thorough report on the Player One Poseidon-M camera at a later date, I’ve only just received it recently and have had a spotty few nights out with it, but I’m pretty impressed so far. I ordered a full set of Chroma filters for it, and my first clear night the only filter that had arrived was a 3nm Ha (Hydrogen Alpha) narrowband filter. The Moon was up and well, Ha is great in the moonlight, and I could not wait to try the new toy out.

Well, who doesn’t shoot M42 when they get a new camera? It’s bright, it’s pretty, and it’s loaded with glowing hydrogen gas — I have a shiny new camera and high quality 3nm hydrogen filter. I wanted to see how much detail I could get out of the trapezium, which is the very bright core of M42, so I experimented to see how long I could go without saturating that region. I was shooting at high conversion gain (HCG), but could go a full minute and still make out the four stars of the trapezium. The screen stretch showed glorious detail already and so I decided one minute was enough.

Hydrogen Alpha image of M42 region — Who doesn’t shoot M42 when they get a new camera?

Orion passes between two trees from my backyard each night, and I only got 104 of these one minute exposures over two nights, but it was quite enough for an impressive image non-the-less of the entire region. I would have liked to get more to reduce the noise in the outer areas, but it is definitely good enough for the internet as is. One minute narrowband subs (oh, this was at f/7 by the way) is pretty impressive, but I have to admit, M42 is a pretty bright target, so I tried a few others also at shorter exposures.

Tadpoles in Ha — Tadpoles are a must image with narrowband filters.

I did some one and two minute exposures on the Rosette and the Tadpoles and stacked equivalent spans of time for each. The one minute stacks did not suffer from what I could tell from a qualitative inspection vs. the stack of two minute subs (both stacks of about half an hour).

I also did 162 x 60 seconds on the Cone nebula region. The screen stretch of the individual subs was very faint on this region, but the stacked result was quite spectacular I thought. The fox fur region is just loaded with detail and subjectively I’d say it’s every bit as good as what I used to do with CCD’s and longer (individual exposures).

Rosetta nebula in Ha — A very popular target in Ha, the Rosetta nebula does not disappoint.

I’ve been speaking about the new age of shorter exposures for a while now, but I’ll abbreviate my thesis in that shorter individual exposures are becoming more usable due to camera improvements, but the total integration time for a quality image has only diminished very slightly due to increases in QE (Quantum Efficiency). There is still only so much light coming from astronomical objects, and it still takes hours of total integration time to create a very high quality image. These images look great on the web, but if I were to print them or display higher resolution versions, I’d want a little more integration time to better smoothen them out (from shot noise).

I plan to push on this camera pretty hard, do a lot more experiments (both qualitative and quantitative), write some software, and take some pretty pictures. Stay tuned…

Cone nebula region — One minute Ha subs at f/7. Individual subs were pretty faint, but 162 of them turned out quite nice!

Oh, and if you can, be sure and catch my talk on “The Future of Astrophotography” at the upcoming Winter Star Party, or you can read a reprint of my August 2022 Sky & Telescope article “The Next Big Thing” here.

Sky-Watcher 25th Anniversary Limited-Edition SkyMax 127 Virtuoso GTI $775.00

Sky-Watcher 25th Anniversary Limited-Edition SkyMax 127 Virtuoso GTI
$775.00