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Meade Telescopes

[ULO buildings] The observatory has three Meade telescopes: two 10" Schmidt-Cassegrain LX200 models and a 7" Maksutov-Cassegrain. These are now used as semi-portable instruments to augment our permanently mounted C14s.

Features include the capability of slewing automatically to any object of known co-ordinates and centre it in the field of view. The LX200s are capable of locating and centring objects with a precision of better than one arcminute, selected from a database of more than 64,000 celestial objects.


LX200:
Acquired: 1993
Optics: Schmidt-Cassegrain
Aperture: 10" (250mm)
Focal Length: 100" (2500mm)
Detector: Visual and SBIG ST-8XME CCD (1530x1020 array, 9x9 micron pixels)
Additional Instrumentation: Eyepiece Spectroscopes, 35mm camera body
Field of view: 19 x 12.6 arcmin (CCD)
Controls: Digital GoTo
Mount: computer-controlled Meade fork mount

The LX200 has a body is made of aluminium, primary and secondary mirrors of Pyrex glass, and a correcting plate/lens of clear float glass. The instrument as a whole weighs 86 lbs.

The Meade 7" Maksutov-Cassegrain was developed for its excellent imaging capabilities, specifically for lunar, planetary and double-star observations. It has a 7" spherical-meniscus correcting lens of grade BK7 optical glass.

Imaging performance is optimised by the combination of the spherical-meniscus lens, a strongly aspheric f/2.5 primary mirror, and a spherical secondary mirror which multiplies the effective focal length of the primary by a factor of six.