The difficult face-on spiral galaxy M74 in Pisces had definite structure to its core and the mottled patches in its spiral arms were a wonderful sight. Its smaller cousin M76 was another attractive target and its apple core form was obvious. The scope’s advanced coma-free (ACF) design really does seem to work well. M27, the Dumbbell Nebula, was a joy to see with its hourglass shape easy to make out. The globular cluster M15 in Pegasus looked fantastic at 100x magnification: a haze of stars, most of them resolved. However, we were really treated at around 400x when the field of view filled up with pinpoint stars from edge to edge. We chose a good range of galaxies, globular clusters, open clusters and nebulae to test the scope and were treated to a number of memorably impressive sights.Īlthough we used the supplied 26mm Plössl as much as possible, we did augment it with a couple of extra eyepieces of our own for a bit of extra range. Through the eyepiece this scope really delivers the field of view appears vibrant and bright. The AutoStar II’s database contains an impressive 147,541 selectable objects ranging from the Moon right down to some eye-straining faint fuzzies.ĭon’t expect to be able to see all of the objects on offer, though, because some are beyond the visual capability of the telescope but would be picked up by a sensitive CCD camera.ĭespite an initial glitch, finding objects with the AutoStar’s Go-To function worked very well it placed them in the field of view of a low-power eyepiece every time. This results in a high-performance optical system that delivers pin-sharp stars across the entire field of view. The LX200-ACF design overcomes both problems inexpensively by using a hyperbolic secondary mirror. Traditionally, scopes that try to correct for both optical aberrations, called aplanatic telescopes, are expensive to produce. Unfortunately, such mirrors have a flaw because they have spherical aberration, a condition where light from the outer part of the mirror reaches focus closer to the mirror than light from the centre.Ī corrector plate is usually fitted to the front of the telescope to reduce the spherical aberration, but the design would still suffer from coma, which causes stars at the edge of the view to look a bit blurred. The LX200-ACF telescope stands out from its predecessors because of its advanced coma-free (ACF) optics. The original LX200 range was based on the Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, which uses an easy-to-produce spherical primary mirror as its optical heart.

Meade autostar 2 for sale