Hakos TI450

Aerospace-Grade Italian Craftsmanship

Telescopi Italiani represents the pinnacle of modern telescope manufacturing, born from a fusion of aerospace engineering and decades of deep-sky imaging experience. Founded by aerospace engineers and composite-material experts, the company designs its instruments using advanced Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to ensure absolute structural integrity. Every telescope is meticulously crafted in Italy, bridging the gap between high-end amateur astrophotography and professional observatory standards.

Uncompromising Design Features

The TI450 is not just a telescope; it is a rigorously optimized photon-gathering machine designed specifically for the rigors of remote operation.

Massive Light Gathering: With a 450mm (18-inch) clear aperture, this telescope resolves exceptionally fine details and easily reveals faint, low-surface-brightness targets.

Fast f/4.0 Optics: Operating at an 1800mm focal length, the f/4 focal ratio makes it incredibly fast. This allows you to gather deep, rich signal in a fraction of the time required by slower observatory scopes.

Thermal Stability: The structural body and truss poles are constructed from aerospace-grade carbon fiber. This provides a remarkably high stiffness-to-weight ratio and near-zero thermal expansion, ensuring focus remains tack-sharp even as desert temperatures drop overnight.

Remote-Optimized Automation: Featuring integrated electronics, precise robotic focusing, and a flat, diffraction-limited corrected field, the TI450 is tailor-made to pair with large-format CMOS sensors for seamless remote imaging.

To harness the full potential of a 450mm aperture, you need a foundation of absolute stability. The TI450 is mounted on the PlaneWave L500, an observatory-class, direct-drive mount that redefines tracking accuracy and remote reliability.

Zero Backlash, Zero Error: Direct-drive motors and high-resolution on-axis encoders eliminate gears entirely, meaning no periodic error, no backlash, and incredibly smooth tracking.

Sub-Arcsecond Tracking: The L500 effortlessly tracks at under 0.3 arcseconds RMS. This allows for long, unguided exposures that perfectly preserve the pinpoint stars delivered by the optics and the steady Namibian atmosphere.

Lightning-Fast Slewing: Capable of slewing at up to 50 degrees per second, the mount minimizes target acquisition time, ensuring you spend your booked hours exposing data, not waiting for the telescope to move.

Capturing the photons gathered by the TI450 is the Moravian Instruments C5-100A, an industrial-grade CMOS camera designed for massive fields of view and ultra-deep scientific and aesthetic imaging.

100-Megapixel Medium Format: Built around the back-illuminated Sony IMX461 sensor, its huge 55mm diagonal and 3.76-micron pixels perfectly sample the TI450's flat field, capturing sprawling nebulae and galaxy clusters in a single frame.

Flawless Remote Calibration: Unlike many commercial CMOS cameras, the "Asymmetrical" (C5A) model features a built-in mechanical shutter. This allows for fully automated, remote acquisition of dark and bias frames without needing to physically cover the telescope.

Extreme Low-Noise Cooling: A heavy-duty, regulated thermoelectric cooling system drives the sensor down to 45°C below ambient temperatures, ensuring whisper-quiet read noise and practically zero dark current even during the longest narrow-band exposures.

The observatory features a comprehensive Chroma filter set including standard LRGB broadband filters plus specialized narrowband options for advanced emission line imaging. The Ha, OIII, and SII filters enable dramatic narrowband compositions and detailed studies of nebular structures and stellar formation regions.

This versatile filter complement supports both natural-color RGB imaging and scientific narrowband techniques like the popular Hubble Palette (SHO) processing. The high-quality Chroma optics ensure excellent transmission and blocking characteristics, maximizing contrast and color fidelity for professional-grade astronomical imaging and research applications.