[Quark (Trevor)]

Hi Rob,

I have had a 16" F4.5 Meade Starfinder for a long time, about 17 yrs.
I have listened with interest about reports, mostly bad, of other peoples experience with these scopes.

Initially when I bought mine, I only wanted the optics, however I was told that I had to buy a complete unit so I purchased it as a Starfinder Dob.

I had already designed and built a very heavy GEM to mount the scope on. From the get go I had problems with collimation. It was impossible for this scope to hold collimation with the Meade engineered primary mirror cell and secondary mirror mount. They were just not up to the task of coping with the mass of such a large primary and especially not the mass of a 4" secondary.

It looked to me that the same mounting hardware that was used on smaller scopes in the range was used on the 16". If I collimated the scope with it in the vertical plane, as I moved it in any direction from the vertical the collimation would move ever further out of whack.

After 6 months of trailing different solutions I finally solved the problem. I designed and built my own 27 point primary mirror cell, this was a very strong but open design that used 2 separate triangulated sections made from 25 x 25 x 3mm steel sq tubing, each triangle was fully welded. I also built my own spider and secondary mirror mount that was considerably superior to the Meade design and did not flex with the weight of the secondary (about 1 kg) swinging on it.

Following all of this I sent some DSO images with a letter to the manager of the Meade Corporation, some of these images had been published in America's Sky & Telescope, I told him about my modifications and how easy it would have been to fix this at his end. I didn’t really expect to get a reply but I did. I received a very nice letter from Meade congratulating me on the quality of my images but with no recognition at all by them of my criticisms of their mounting hardware.

I have used my scope quite successfully for very hi res planetary imaging and I would say to those that criticise these scopes that their problems are very likely not with the optics but with the mounting hardware for the primary & secondary mirrors. Obviously these problems must have been addressed to some extent by Meade otherwise no one would be using these scopes.

Back in June when Bird came to visit for a week I had the opportunity to see at first hand the side by side comparison of two scopes of similar F/L, both using the same imaging system and let me say that there is a significant difference between off the shelf and custom made optics.

My trusty Meade has served me very well and I have learnt so much about planetary imaging with it, however, I am right now in the process of building a new 16” F 4.5 scope that will have custom finished optics. I am designing it using the “Newt” ray trace telescope design program that Bird introduced me to and it will be tuned to perform optimally for planetary imaging. It will have a custom primary from Mark Suchting and a 1/30 wavelength secondary from Antares Optics, with a fully baffled aluminium, tube from Gary Mitchell.

I understand the scope you are looking at has the Meade optics but in a truss Dob, if the secondary mirror mount is up to scratch then it should be fine for planetary observing. I use Orthoscopic 4mm & 6mm eyepieces for planetary observing and have seen some stunning views of Saturn and Jupiter through my 16, obviously the field of view is narrow and presents some problems with a Dob mount but now days there are a few ways around that problem with eq tables, servocat etc.

Hope this is of interest.
Regards
Trevor