LOMO Astele 70mm Maksutov
Review
I guess a lot of readers of this website travel for business and
if you’re away a lot, one of the many frustrations is that you can’t observe,
even when you get some free time. This is particularly annoying if it means
missing some event like a solar or lunar eclipse, a transit, or an occultation.
The answer, of course, is a tiny scope that can go with you. My experience is
that if it’s going to stand any chance of being lugged along with suits and
laptop, a scope has to be really small and the Lomo 70 is just that:
about eight inches long and a couple of pounds in weight.
LOMO are a long-established Russian maker of Maksutovs
ranging all the way up to big semi-professional stuff. The 70mm is their second
smallest (there’s a 60mm as well) and probably the entry level for astronomy.
It’s a truly tiny scope, significantly smaller than a Tele Vue TV-60 (one of
the very smallest refractors), and fits in a little case about the same size
and shape as one for an electric shaver. Even the smallest photo tripod will
carry it. On the face of it, then, an ideal travel scope for when there just
isn’t room for anything much bigger than bino’s (i.e.
most business trips).
At
A Glance
|
Telescope |
LOMO 70mm Maksutov |
|
Aperture |
70mm |
|
Focal Length |
880mm |
|
Focal Ratio |
F12.5 |
|
Central Obstruction (incl. holder/baffle) |
40% by diam |
|
Length |
~200mm |
|
Weight |
~1Kg |
Data from Me.
Design and Build
There are two makes of Russian army truck you see everywhere in
Siberia – Kamaz and Ural. These trucks are massively
engineered in the nothing-fancy Soviet style and impressively rugged. The
little Lomo is a bit like that, in spirit if not in size: I get the impression
it was originally designed as an army spotting scope.
It's worth noting that a lot of the mil-spec optical devices made in
the USSR for the military and hunters ended up sold to western consumers in the
early years after the Wall fell. Many of these are like this LOMO – beautifully
and ruggedly engineered, with decent optics that don’t quite match the
engineering. I have personally owned two folding telescopes and one monocular from
this post-Soviet optical diaspora. The monocular was a close relative of this
LOMO 70.
It’s also worth noting that LOMO made the triplet objectives for
two of the finest 80mm apochromats – the ‘TMB’ 80/480 and 80/600 once marketed
by APM and also found in William Optics OTAs – so they certainly can make
excellent optics.
Optics
The little LOMO is a conventional Gregorian Maksutov
with the secondary mirror as a silver spot on the inside of the corrector plate.
The secondary obstruction is on the high-side at 40% by diameter. Focal length
is 880mm (F12.5). The integral visual back is 1.25” and you can’t fit a 2”. Focusing
is by moving mirror. All just like a Questar, then!
Look in the front and the corrector appears
properly multicoated and held in by a machined locking ring inscribed with the
optical spec’. A long, very finely machined baffle tube protrudes from the main
mirror: tapered to match the light cone and micro-ridged on the inside to
further prevent scatter. Nice.
Tube
The body, including the visual back, is milled from a solid billet
of aluminium. The whole OTA is coated in grey knobbly powder coat. Even the
thread-on dew shield is aluminium and nicely coated with flat black on the
inside. The metal focusing knob on the right side is metal too and its action
is superbly smooth and precise. The dust cap is the only plastic item, but it’s
well made, clicks firmly into place and has a little Lomo logo in the middle.
Look into the visual back and you see only finely machined,
anodised parts. The overall impression here is of a beautifully engineered
little telescope.
The only let-down, if you can call it that, is the faux-Questar
stick-on star map ‘round the tube: it’s of no practical use and looks tacky.
Overall though, top marks for fit and finish. Rip off the star map, paint the
tube lime green and you’d almost think it was a Takahashi. Someone has been to
a lot of trouble over the construction of this telescope. If designed from
scratch and built in the West, this level of quality would be expensive indeed.
Accessories
The scope comes with a cheap-but-ok mirror diagonal, a generic
(Chinese?) 25mm eyepiece giving a mag’ of 40x and a nice screw-on dewshield, all of which fit in the tiny case with the OTA.
The finder is a simple gunsight with holes you line-up and there
is no shoe to mount a red dot (more on that later).
Mounting
There is an integral mounting plate on the bottom of the OTA with
a ¼-20 threaded hole for a photo tripod. This little scope is obviously so
light and short it will be reasonably stable on the lightest and flimsiest of
photo tripods – a big advantage for easy travel.
In Use - Daytime
I first used the little Mak as a
spotter, taking it up onto the hill behind the town where I live and scanning
the villages across the Bay. I’m reminded of how small it is. Unlike a typical
small refractor, there are no extension tubes to make it longer in use. Even
so, the moving mirror system gives enough back-focus to use the Plossl straight through if you want.
Sighting onto things is quite easy in daytime by aligning the
rings of the gunsight. The 25mm Plossl gives a mag’
of 40x with lots of eye relief and reminds me that a long focus instrument like
this can give good magnification with simple eyepieces. The daytime view is
nice – crisp and sharp, better than many terrestrial spotters at this sort of
magnification. I can read the name of a pub three miles away.
As I said before, I think this was designed as a spotting scope
(with all that careful machining subsidised by the Russian military) and in
that role it works well, but... read on.
In Use – The Night Sky
General Observing Notes
At night everything changes. Now it’s impossible to see the little
rings you have to line up in the gunsight and finding things is made even
harder because of the small field of view – the downside of F12. This scope desperately needs a finder, but
there is nowhere to put one. I tried sticking a red-dot finder to the back of
the OTA, but it would never stay put on that knobbly paint for long. Finding
anything apart from the Moon becomes a torture of sweeping back and forth. One
possible fix I haven’t tried is to paint the gunsight rings with luminous
paint.
The Moon
Most tiny scopes end up mainly used on the Moon I reckon and an
obvious use for this little Maksutov is eclipses, both
lunar and solar.
Testing the Lomo on the Moon, I’m using it alongside a MiniBorg – a tiny 50mm achromat – and the contrast
(literally) is amazing: at F5 the Borg needs no finder and using it is very
easy compared to the Mak. What’s more, now the views
from the little Russian scope are less satisfying than during the day. The Moon
just seems sharper and more contrasty in the
refractor, with sharper edges and darker shadows. The Maksutov
seems soft by comparison and offers no more detail, despite the larger
aperture.
Planets
On other subjects the situation is worse. Try as I might I can’t
make out Saturn’s Cassini division in the little LOMO. At least the view in the
Borg is much sharper and more appealing.
In the end, the principal astronomical use I found for the LOMO
was a bit of “sidewalk astronomy”
outside the office, watching both the recent Mercury and Venus transits using
simple eyepiece projection, a purpose for which the long-F Mak
is well suited (although finding the sun was a bit of a challenge). Quite a few
colleagues gathered around and really enjoyed seeing that little black dot edge
its way across the photosphere. In this respect the little Lomo did its job as
a travel scope and reminded me of what could have been if its optics had been
better.
Transit of
Mercury in 2003, projected by the Lomo (outside my apartment block in
Brussels).
Deep Sky
The only DSO I looked at was M42. Whereas the Orion Nebula is a
beautiful mass of swirls under my dark skies in the Mini Borg, in the Mak it is dim and dull. I end up abandoning the Lomo and
using the Borg for the rest of the night.
Star Test
A star test (when I eventually find one!) reveals the problem –the
optics are miscollimated, not badly, but enough to
spoil things a bit. There appears to be no way to adjust them (unlike the 95mm
version) and an email I sent to Lomo’s support address (translated into
Russian) asking for collimation instructions never received a reply. As a
result, this scope is of somewhat limited value for astronomy.
Summary
What a shame! This is one very nicely made scope and it seems
crazy to lavish such care on its manufacture only to ruin it with badly
aligned, non-adjustable optics and no after sales service. I’m pretty sure they
are not all like that, though, and if you can find a good used one (they are no
longer imported, I believe, though Lomo still makes them) then it could make a
nice last-a-lifetime travel scope. However, carefully star-test it first and
then be prepared to drill some holes to mount a finder!
Note: I have a smaller LOMO spotter that was clearly made in the
same factory, with very similar styling and build. It too is a mechanical
marvel spoiled by rotten optics.
Cautiously recommended, if only for its beautiful build quality,
but only if you find a good one.