The following are the first photos* I took with a new Televue Pronto 70mm refractor. Sorry about the long download time. You are looking at what is essentially my proof sheet which is meant to be loaded off a local hard disk. All are shot using Kodak PPF 400 (unhypered) at 480mm focal length, manually guided under mostly windy (and cold) conditions. The camera used was a Model II Taurus astro camera (35mm film), which has a built-in off-axis guider.

* Except for some tests I did from my back yard in Cerritos which definitely aren't worth looking at because of light pollution!

I did not use the optional field flattener because it requires the use of a T-threaded camera (a project for another day). The distortion of the unflattened Pronto field is evident on some of the frames because of this. Also I wasn't careful about composing the shots so the shadow of the guider mirror appears at the edge of some shots... oh, well, live and learn...

There is also some noticeable chromatic aberration (violet halos) around bright blue stars, but that's what I expected since the Pronto is an ED glass doublet design.

My conclusion using the Pronto was that it performed very nicely and, considering how expensive a 500mm telephoto lens costs, it is a good value, especially since I plan to use it as a portable telescope on trips. And especially if you appreciate precision equipment, it's definitely the one to get.