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Spica Eyes SlipStream
"There is something very special in taking ownership of an instrument in which every individual part feels that it has been carefully considered and designed for its purpose within a comprehensive system. Tom Osypowski's Spica Eyes telescopes possess a wonderful clean functional simplicity based on profound insight into the engineering of telescope structures and the highest quality materials and components, all realized by Tom's exceptional craftsmanship. It is often the little touches that really matter, and a Spica Eyes telescope is full of them from the imposing rigidity of the aluminum structure to the welded mirror cells and edge supports to the back and front sealed mirror box covers to the slip clutch tracking system to the quality of the powder coating, there are so many more. From the moment I placed my order for a 24" F/3.25 Spica Eyes when Tom told me that he was drawing up plans for my telescope right through to final delivery he has kept me informed and involved throughout every step of its construction sending both status reports and images. In terms of design, engineering, quality, and customer service, my experience has been truly exceptional, the completed telescope performs superbly, and I highly recommend a Spica Eyes telescope as an example of one of the finest large aperture telescopes available today."
Chris Ford
"Here are some of the test images I showed you on the live view of my Canon 60Da DSLR on Saturday at GSSP. The native resolution of these images is 5184 X 3456 using a 4 micron APS-C sensor. To fit them into a manageable size to send by email, I had to scale them down almost 5 times to 1280 x 853 and you can still see they work really well. These are all unguided ** 15 second ** ISO 5000 single exposures at the highest resolution and definition that is not currently possible with a Mallincan or other NTSC resolution video/webcam type devices. I also did some 5-10 second test exposures that with some luminance stretching post processing would be just as good. In the attached images, though, there is no stacking or processing and what you see is straight out of the camera. All I did was convert the RAW format into jpeg through iPhoto. What I find really compelling is that these images could have been cover material for Sky and Telescope 10 years ago and would have taken hours to stack and process.
