Building a STELLINA clone
If you are willing to operate a mount and do all the geeky things nerds do then you can build a Stellina replica for less than half of what Stellina costs...
To mimic Stellina’s design I employed my sky watcher Alt Az GTI mount (I talk about this mount here). You can control the via wifi through an app on your phone (just like Stellina!) In alt az mode this mount is able to handle a Stellina sized 80mm aperture ed refractor. YouTuber Astrofarsography very kindly lent me his Skywatcher Evostar 80ed scope. You can check out his YouTube channel here.
I think the Evostar 72ed is a better scope than the 80ed
Thing is the Skywatcher 80ed is too long. Or another way of putting it is that it is too slow. In fact at f7.5 I’d say the Evostar 80ed is disappointingly slow (I think at F5.9 the skywatcher 72ed, or a Williams Optics 80mm is a better scope for deep space astrophotography). Stellina's scope is really fast. For the 80ed to catch up we need to reduce its focal length to about 500mm I used an old borg 0.7x super reducer. You can’t buy these anymore. I got mine for about £200 second had and used an adapter supplied by Beat from Switzerland (if you buy from him please tell him the biscuit sent you!) to allow the borg reducer to fit into a standard 2” focuser.
The optolong L eNhance filter performs as well as filters I own which cost 3 times the price.
The final part of the clone is the camera. I used ZWO’s asi178mc. This is a very fine lunar, solar and planetary camera which (as mentioned here) can also be used for deep space astrophotography. Oh and I nearly forgot. I employed an absolutely brilliant light pollution filter, the optolong L enhance. Turns out this light pollution filter is more aggressive than Stellina’s but hey ho, I had no way of knowing what Stellina was using beneath that futuristic looking plastic exterior.
