After acquiring my 200mm Takumar which is giving pleasing results I began looking for a decent cheap 300mm prime lens that might be suited to astro work. Research led me to the Russian Tair-3 which got favourable reports from several users. After seeing some quite impressive examples of photos taken with the lens I decided to visit eBay and found a good example in the Ukraine which I duly purchased and received in 7 days. The lens is built like a tank and is very heavy given its aperture of F 4.5. It has some unusual features including being part of a system that was mounted like a rifle using a gun trigger to fire the shutter....It came complete with the gunlike attachments though I would feel a bit conspicuous using it in that way!.... Keen to try it on the stars I gave it a go under abysmal conditions with continuous patches of cloud and poor transparency. I was only able to obtain half a dozen murky subs of around 5 minutes which have little depth but were sufficient to reveal how well the lens performs. It produces very little CA and is nicely coma free round the edges so I'm looking forward to trying it more seriously. This image is just a random area in Cygnus a bit above Deneb. Details: Tair 3s 300mm F5.6 6 x 5 minutes @ iso1600 (full field) with CLS in DSS, FIV, CS2 & XAT.
After acquiring my 200mm Takumar which is giving pleasing results I began looking for a decent cheap 300mm prime lens that might be suited to astro work. Research led me to the Russian Tair-3 which got favourable reports from several users. After seeing some quite impressive examples of photos taken with the lens I decided to visit eBay and found a good example in the Ukraine which I duly purchased and received in 7 days. The lens is built like a tank and is very heavy given its aperture of F 4.5. It has some unusual features including being part of a system that was mounted like a rifle using a gun trigger to fire the shutter....It came complete with the gunlike attachments though I would feel a bit conspicuous using it in that way!.... Keen to try it on the stars I gave it a go under abysmal conditions with continuous patches of cloud and poor transparency. I was only able to obtain half a dozen murky subs of around 5 minutes which have little depth but were sufficient to reveal how well the lens performs. It produces very little CA and is nicely coma free round the edges so I'm looking forward to trying it more seriously. This image is just a random area in Cygnus a bit above Deneb. Details: Tair 3s 300mm F5.6 6 x 5 minutes @ iso1600 (full field) with CLS in DSS, FIV, CS2 & XAT.
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