SCT for the high-power crowd?

Can you articulate why this SCT would be an advance upon a similarly well-made Newtonian? It seems to me that a Newtonian can be made that more than matches the optical quality of your SCT, at lower monetary cost. The trade-off is that the Newtonian would have somewhat worse off-axis performance, but if you're talking about high-resolution/high-contrast observing, this isn't much of an issue, providing you can get some nominal tracking (or you don't mind tracking by hand).

In other words, this seems like an attempt to make a jack of all trades into a master of one. Probably I'm missing something, but I need a nudge in the right direction to see what that is.

"Maybe someone with ties to the "industry" can answer a question for me. Why are there no SCT's designed for high resolution/high contrast observing? The cost of a 10 inch MAK or Refractor is well beyond the financial abilities of the people I associate with yet I find this size of telescope to be excellent when you balance the size of the scope against high power image brightness, detail, and average seeing conditions. A 10" cooled high definition SCT produced by Celestron or Meade should be affordable to all who desire a medium cost, large, high power instrument."

There exists a high end 10” F/15 SCT with smallish co., can not think of the name but it is produced in central Europe, it costs at least as much as a 10” high end Maksutov.
Takahashi also produced a high end SCT, 9” F/12 with 27% co. I believe that they produced 100 units before the production stopped, these do show up on Astromart from time to time for about +/-$5K.

Celestron and Meade are not set up to produce high end SCT’s, their production methodology is geared towards mass production and they do a reasonably good job at that. Re-figuring the mirror to a 1/8 wave will not turn a commercial SCT to a high end instrument, for that the entire design process needs to be re-examined resulting in a new instrument, from ground up.

Vahe

Hello:

I have a 10" Celestron SCT made in 1967. It's f/13 and has a central obstruction of 30%. The image quality is excellent. While your design has a 2.6" secondary, when you add the size of the secondary mirror cell and baffle, the central obstruction will end up around 3".

It's been my opinion for some time that the central obstruction issue is way overblown. People consider the usual SCT as a non-planetary instrument since they have a 33% central obstruction. I think these same people would be quite surprised to find that HST also has a central obstruction around 33%, and I haven't heard any complaints about HST's planetary images.

Cheers
Mike Connelley

Attached Image:

It's probably because any good Russian 6" Mak-Cass will beat a C11 on sharpness for high power visual observation. For brightness the C11 wins. For lunar/planetary, the 6" Russian Mak wins. Use the SCT for photography, where contrast loss has less effect.