Pieter Welters Reviews

It is a nicely designed scope. Nice to look at, even nicer to look through! Optics: Awesome! Never saw an optical quality like this in a non-refractor scope. Its like looking through a big apo. Contrast (on Saturn) is fabulous. Star test estimates wavefront error about 1/12 lambda or even better. Resolving power is fine as well: during very short moments of perfect seeing Gamma Vir (0.5 in april 2006) looks like a peanut at 636x. Spikes are somewhat visible in the image at bright objects, for who is not used to it. It is not disturbing at all though. Collimation: I was warned about difficulties. Though, the only point is the level of precision required. The collimation screws must be turned by just a tiny bit. Much less than at SCTs. Thats all. I had no difficulties collimating my Mewlon. Moreover: it holds collimation very well. Used the scope 4x since then and recollimation was not required at all. Ease of use: Focusing runs nice and smoothly. Mirror shift only 20 or so. Never saw as little as that in any SCT or Mak. Cooling down runs much faster as in SCTs and Maks, because of the open design. The finder must be mentioned as well. Its a miracle. Put the object in the crosshairs and it appears in the field of a 322x magnification. It is a carrying handle as well, without harming the alignment ever. Mount wedge is included. The scope is compact, lightweight (8kg) and sturdy, because of the rounded frond end of the tube (its a baffle as well!). It is a suberb planetary scope for both observation and imaging, and for deep sky observation as well. Though for deep sky imaging Mewlon 210 is not my first choice as result of slow optics and small flat field. Optional Focal reducer reduces f/11.5 to f/9.3, which is no serious improvement.