60MT

The Lunt60MT is a dedicated solar scope and is probably one of my highest quality build scopes. It is just a solid well made scope, probably has to be due to potential heating issues caused with solar imaging. The scope is a Multu-purpose scope meaning that with loosening a few thumb screws you can convert to deep space nighttime triple APO refractor, I haven't tried it yet in that configuration but it's always nice to have that option.

As a solar scope this thing rocks, and is much different than putting a filter over your other scopes, which is called white light filtering (think eclipse glasses). But with the Lunt60MT it has a pressure tuned Ha modular that is separate from the focuser. So once the image is clear you start to increase the pressure on the Ha module and the texture of the sun just pops right out. The scope can also support a second Ha pressurization module for even crisper images but I have not gone down that path. I paired this scope with an ASI174mm planetary camera that provides a nice full disk image of the sun and lots of framerate to support lucky imagining. Lucky imaging is probably what the first few images I ever took of deep space targets as I had no idea what I was doing but in this case it's a method for capturing main images of the sun/planet as a video. This allows software like AutoStakkert to slice the video up into an image per frame and grade each image for focus/clarity. This is allows you to use only the images not affected by atmospheric turbulence and stack those images to pull out the detail of the image.

Overall I'm very happy with expansion into the solar side of astrophotography and plan to do it quite frequently during the solar maximum these coming years.