Aries Safix, brief review

Hi,

10 days ago I got the chance to see first time in my live the Aries made
Safix ( spherical aberration corrector)and bought one for testing on
diffrent telescopes.

The Safix was designed and is manufactored by Aries in Ukraine, to
improve the spherical correction of smoothly over or undercorrected
telescope systems to improve not only the startest but mainly the
infocuse image. The design contains from a multicoated lens system in a
tunnable housing with outer microscaling to read out the position of
best spherical correction for the specific telescope. On diagonal side
it comes with a standart 1.25" barrel and at eyepiece side it comes with
3 diffrent long eyepieceholders with compression ring. This diffrent
holders shall be used for diffrent focallenght telescopes.

- Mechanics
The tunning works like a helical focuser with no shift. The anadizing
is good , but not of that shiny high quality we know from some US or
Taiwan made anadized products.The compression rings sitting somewhat to
deep maschined in the eyepieceholder so its function is only to not
scratch the eyepiece barrel. The eyepiece holders are well made in its
inner diameter so the to deep sitting compression rings doe not shift
your eyepiece out of axis, but I prefer if that would be improoved to
give such compression ring his full working potential.

- Optics and coating: my sample show no bubbles, no dirt or dust, no
scratches and a goldish kind coating , not the colors we know of modern
multicoatings. Talking to Aries about that, Valery Deryuzhin told me
that kind of coating is used to support a natural white image . This
natural white Image I can confirm by looking straight through the coated
glas on a white piece of paper but also watching white stars, the image
remains neutral white as it shall be, so the coating doing here job well

- performance:
the performance I tested in 3 ways
a, on the bench against articval star
b, on a day time object
c, under real sky on stars and Planets

the used telescopes for testing this device:
a, 4" Fluorite Apo with smooth global undercorrection estimated at
startest with about 1/3 to 1/4 wavefront p.t.v.
b, a small high quality maksutov Cassegrain with a smooth 1/5 wagvefront
undercorrection
c, a massproduced but smooth visual zonal free Schmidt Cassegrain 10"
with about 1/4 wavefront ( visual estimation)

on all above scopes I found the same results
a, the scopes showed on the bench and under real sky a symmetrical
image with a nice airydisc and diffraction rings soroundet. In all
scopes the diffraction rings took to much energy out of the airydisc and
spreadet some straylight into the black sky, when slightly or more
outside defocused. Now I installed the Safix.
First finding you must do about same level of backfocuse change as the
Safix have its own mechanical lenght. This is a limitation for
telescopes with to small backfocuse , like modern Dobs and Newtonians
and of course Mak Newtonians with only a little backfocuse, here the
safix cannot be used, because it does not come to focuse.In the apo I
have had to remove the stardiagonal and observe in straight mode,
because it have had also not enough backfocuse.
Now I started to use the helical focusing tunner . Turn the tunner step
by step and after each step do a startest, see if image got more equal
in startest or worser. If worser you turn the wrong direction, if better
continue this way. Sooner or later you will find a position where the
startest show you a equal image inside and outside of focuse. Now
compare the infocuse image with and without the Safix and you find the
following:
without safix you see the way diffrent images and the straylight out of
focuse in the black sky and the numbers of diffraction rings is about
3-5 piece. Install the safix now with your best findings, and you will
see no more straylight in the black background, the airydisc increased
its diameter slightly and got higher energy , the numbers of diffraction
rings decreased. On the bench I found that I could improve the image of
that apo to the level of a real very high end quality apo, to my own
surprise, since I did not expected such dramaticle improvement.
Under sky I used Castor douple to see what happened.Here the diffraction
ring became much fainter and the image was more stable and the splitting
was simply much easier.
At Jupiter I found with the Safix a increased amount of details on the
belts. Saturns Cassini got cleaner and much better visible.

Daytime: I have to be honest due sunny days with for shure not best
seeing, I could not see a real diffrence.

Not yet I have tested if the safix does anything good on scopes with
zonal deffects or not, but what I found is that the safix is a tool
which can improve your optical medium to low end scope into a real high
end optical telescope if the under or overcorrection is the only
mistake.

So far I can say this Safix is one of the most impressive accessories I
have come across in past 15 years and I wam wondering very much, that
there is not yet a Safix hysterical out

thanks for any reply

clear skies

Markus Ludes


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