Venus tuned / near UV telescopes?

[skybender]

You guys make hydrogen alpha tuned lenses,  have you considered going near ultraviolet and making a "venus telescope".

something along the lines of .96 strehl at 393nm

[Mike]

Apollo, with a good optician onboard the possibilities are endless or should I say the sky is the limit. The problem is telescopes made for very specific use don't sell. Most guys will not let an expensive telescope sit around unused for the majority of the year. They will sell it and buy something they can use more often. I have an 8" Parallax reflector with a Royce mirror that I bought specifically to image Venus. I have a custom built barlow made of fused silica uncoated elements that transmit the majority of UV along with a Venus UV filter from Astrodon. All this for imaging Venus in UV. Unfortunately, I have yet to use this setup to image one single frame of Venus. I will eventually but I hate that it's stored and not used. I'm a member of ALPO and if you look at the Venus ALPO group on yahoo only a hand full of guys post. H alpha is far more popular but we still only sell a limited number of those lenses.

[skybender]

Understood. I have a 100mm ed fluorite lens which is supposed to be good for uv transmission. However it is made by celestron so who knows what the lens properties actually are. The objective was harvested out of a damaged regal f-ed spotting scope.

I was hoping for something in the 200mm catagory however