Me and the AP152EDF Starfire on the Takahashi NJP mount getting
ready for a long night of imaging by doing an anti-cloud dance first.
The 6" Starfire is simply amazing and this is one of only two units built by
Roland Christen of Astrophysics in around 1994. In all but the very best
seeing conditions it routinely out performs my 12" LX200GPS on clean resolution
and I have cleanly split 0.75" this scope can certainly reach the Dawes limit in good seeing.
Star images look like they are straight from a computer simulation
ie tiny dots with a single faint broken diffraction ring on a black sky.
I have seen 6 stars in the Trapezium at just 80X magnification! Lovely!
The Takahashi NJP mount (also built in 1994) can track with better-than-the-seeing
performance without autoguidiing! On average nights it is autoguided to better than
0.5 arc sec average guide errors, all night! On steady nights autoguide runs return
average guide errors of as low as just 0.3 arc sec or less - Superb!
For evidence of this amazing raw Japanese tracking
see http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike2002/njp_unguided_exposures