Meade LX200-ACF Telescopes

Optical designers are aways striving to produce better images and to reduce costs. The Schmidt-Cassegrain optical design has been the first choice for large-aperture but compact amateur telescopes for many years. Ritchey-Chretien (RC) optics will out-perform Schmidt-Cassegrain (SC) optics and are the first choice for large research telescopes. However, the complex mirror shapes they require make them prohibitively expensive for all but the deepest pockets.

Now Meade have made a major break-through by combining a spherical primary mirror with a modified corrector to simulate the hyberbolic primary of a true Ritchey-Chretien telescope. Combined with a hyperbolic secondary this gives performance similar to an RC and considerably better than a Schmidt-Cassegrain. The big advantage is that it is considerably less expensive than an RC.

What does that mean for you? It means that in Meade's ACF telescopes (both LX90 and LX200) you get Ritchey-Chretien performance at Schmidt-Cassegrain prices. And in the LX200 you get all the refinements you would expect in a serious imaging telescope. Primary mirror lock, zero image-shift fine focusing, permanent periodic error correction and all the other features that make the LX200 the first choice for many research institutes as well as astrophotographers.