Wavy mentioned the focusing mechanism of the Intes.
Well blow me down! A cassegrain with a moving primary mirror for achieving focus,
AND NO MIRROR SHIFT!
I couldn't believe it! Not a smidge of a shift. Nada, nothing, zip, zilch.
Takahashi Mewlon, Celestron, Meade, Skywatcher, take note: The Russians have done what you haven't, EVER, and they've been doing it for YEARS!
Oh, and with no mirror shift, collimation doesn't change with moving the focusing knob.
However, you do pay for all of this, no mirror shift and quality of optics.
Dave, the Skywatcher Maks I've seen have all been from very good to outstanding. And they've been improving over the years as the manufacturing techniques of the company that's making these Maksutov optics for Synta have been refined. How much better the Intes over the Skywatcher? If I hadn't known about the Intes, I would have happily settled for the Skywatcher 180 Mak. The quality of the SCTs, that's just too variable for me to buy new with no way of star testing first. Two of the SCT's we tested were bloody good, remarkable actually. And I'm quite fond of one of them too as it comes with a really nice fork mount that I love to use with my sketching... <sigh>
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