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At the risk of starting a flame war... The RC design is superior to the ACF/SCT design with regard to deep sky imaging in many ways. Yes, the ACF scope is a step ahead of the standard SCT with regard to coma. The ACF scopes, for starters, are a sealed tube.. This makes it very difficult to get the mirror to ambient temperatures, where as the open tubed RC cools to ambient relatively quickly.. A well designed and built RC will produce better star images than an equally well designed SCT, and the off-axis spot diagrams I've seen show RC's and CDK optical systems leaps and bounds ahead of SCT/ACF optics..
I'm sure many people will be able to give more reasons why an RC is better for deep sky imaging than an SCT/ACF...
This is sort of an unfair comparison, however I will say this, I've produced sharper images with my RC already than I achieved with my SCT.. Allbeit, it was with different cameras, and with my SCT my mount was fairly heavily loaded... But the RC has produced better images for me in the two nights I've used it than the SCT did in 8 months of use...
The biggest kicker for me with the RC is the lack of corrector plate... My SCT's corrector would fog up at the drop of a dime... Also, the corrector plate being a refractive element, can introduce some aberrations, the RC being a purely reflective optical design is free from such aberrations..
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