Telescopes: Meade 10-Inch LX200-ACF (f/10) Advanced Coma-Free Telescope

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Meade 10-Inch LX200-ACF (f/10) Advanced Coma-Free Telescope

Meade 10-Inch LX200-ACF (f/10) Advanced Coma-Free Telescope Reviews

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Meade 10-Inch LX200-ACF (f/10) Advanced Coma-Free Telescope Feature

f/10 Advanced Coma-Free Optics: Building from a classic RC design, Meade has created a new design with the same coma-free pinpoint star images and flatter field also reduces the astigmatism and eliminates diffractions spikes found in classical RCs
Meade Ultra-High Transmission Coatings (UHTC) increases total light transmission and image brightness by nearly 20% over Meade's standard coatings. Objects such as stars, galaxies and nebulae will appear significantly brighter
Zero Image-Shift Microfocuser allows you to obtain precise image focus with no image movement
Oversize Primary Mirror diameters are greater than their listed aperture. This additional 1/4" yields a wide, fully illuminated field-of-view
Primary Mirror Lock locks the mirror in place preventing movement during long-exposure astrophotography

Aperture: 10-Inch. Focal Length: 2500mm. Focal Ratio: f/10. UHTC coatings, Standard Field Tripod, 1.25-Inch Diagonal Prism, 26mm Series 4000 Super Plössl Eyepiece. The most widely used research quality telescope now features the most advanced optical system. Meade’s LX200-ACF brings Advanced Coma-Free (ACF) optics within reach of aspiring astronomers everywhere. Nearly every observatory reflector in the world uses an aplanatic (coma-free) optical system like the Ritchey-Chrétien (RC), including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Now you can own similar optics to what the professionals use. The LX200-ACF includes all the field-proven features of the LX200 including GPS, Primary Mirror Lock, Oversized Primary Mirror, SmartDrive; Smart Mount, AutoStar II and more. The new LX200-ACF. It’s the biggest news in astronomy since, well, the LX200.The “advanced” in Advanced Coma-Free. A traditional Ritchey-Chrétien (RC) is a type of reflector that delivers a coma-free, flat field of view via hyperbolic primary and secondary mirrors. Because the mirrors in these telescopes have always been very expensive to make, few amateur astronomers could enjoy them. Fortunately, Meade engineers developed a radical new Advanced Coma Free design by combining a hyperbolic secondary mirror with a corrector-lens-and-spherical-primary-mirror combination that performs as one hyperbolic element. This ACF design produces a coma-free, flat field of view that rivals traditional RC telescopes at a fraction of the cost. The design even eliminates diffraction spikes and improves astigmatism, both of which are inherent in the traditional RC design. When reviewing Meade’s LX200-ACF Advanced Coma Free, Sky and Telescope magazine said, “ [It] does indeed perform like a [Ritchey-Chrétien]. The difference between the off-axis images (compared to a Schmidt-Cassegrain) was dramatic to say the least.”