Image shift was very slight and there's a mirror lock available. Best to make your final focus a push of the mirror against gravity. It was OK, but has the well known backlash. The FOV is limiting with a 3.5 metre focal length but the sky is not short of targets at this magnification if you have the aperture to support it.Д«ecause we couldn't get the electronic focuser to work we were obliged to use the moving mirror focuser.

There was nothing of the 'fuzzy blob' about it! M27 was very dumb-bell shaped, the central star was just visble in averted vision for me and, again, the scale and brightness were very rewarding. In fact we just left the 26 Nagler in all night, after quitting the planets. M51 wasn't perfectly placed but showed spiral structure, 'the bridge of light' and a satisfying scale and brightness at 135x. This was too big for the FOV, naturally, but cruising within it we found clusters within clusters and, notably, some lovely powdery patches of minute stars which I don't recall seeing before. A favourite was M24, the Sagittarius Star Cloud. The views were not just informative, they were beautiful. The superb stellar quality was maintained edge to edge. (We were SQM21.6 last night.) The Nagler allows, nay requires, you to move your head to find the field stop.

Tiny, tiny stars against the darkest of backgrounds. All present were mightily impressed.В I suppose there is some minor glitch in the planetary ephemeris but it won't be a priority to sort it out since it's easy to find and centre the planets anyway. And this remarkable precision on DSOs continued throughout the night and all over the sky. However, when we asked it to go to M22 it ground more coffee and, bang, there it was smack in the middle of the EP. 'Going To' Saturn produced the same 'near but not quite' result. Jupiter was up so we performed a GoTo and the planet was just out of the EP (a 26mm TeleVue Nagler giving 135x.) Not bad but not ideal for a complete beginner had the target been an obscure DSO. There is no need to set time, date or location since all come from the GPS. And that's it, you are now supposedly aligned. You centre this in the EP and confirm, whereupon it coffee-grinds its way over to a second star, Dubhe this time. The first was Arcturus, which it missed by about 15 degrees. ItВ performs an assortment of gyrations, twists and tilts to orientate itself before heading off to a star named in the handset. With the control panel on the south side (not the north as shown in the picture!) you set the tube to horizontal andВ pointing north, then ask the mount toВ align automatically. Anyway, rightly or wrongly it was was these expectations that I spent my first observng night with the 14 LX200 GPS kindly bequeathed to us by Alan Longstaff. (It wasn't down to collimation, which is easy to get right on an SCT.) I've been very impressed by the only C11 I've tried, though.

It's hard to explain but this opinion grew while I owned first an 8 inch and then a 10 inch Meade. Somehow the stars weren't really pinpoint tiny and the backgrounds weren't as dark as I'd have liked. They give large aperture from small volume, make great solar system imaging scopes, are very comfortable to use visually in Alt Az mode and have tended to give me eyepiece views which had the information but not, for me, the engaging thrill of being out in space. I've never been unreservedly keen on SCTs.

Steve meade designs location