Hello Friend,

             F6.3 vrs F10? Which has more contrast....

You see, I and a friend had taken a Meade  F10 SCT (set up with an f6.3 reducer) telescope and an F6.3 Meade SCT and did a side by side visual comparision.

     And from what we could see, the F10 with the reducer had better contrast than the fixed F6.3 optical design.

Now when I brought this to the attention of Meade CEO John Diebel, at the start of our dinner, well let's just say
that time stopped.

                 And so did dinner..... nothing worse than a bunch of hungry folks, wanting to place their dinner order.

John was simply not impressed with my observation, and before we had dinner, was going make sure I
understood how completely incorrect I was.

Heavens to Betsy!

John got a writing pad, with a piece of white paper, and then proceeded to explain to me with detailed diagrams
as to how I was in error, and make no mistake, the fixed F6.3 had increased contrast and brightness.

    "It's all here on this piece of paper, Ray",  said John.

    Now,  everyone was hungry, and rather than get into something that would be over my head (I'm not an optical designer),
I nodded my head in agreement and we placed our dinner orders.

That's kind of when I thought to myself, well maybe sometimes things look better on paper than they do in reality..

Meade discontinued the F6.3 telescope series  shortly thereafter.  I'm not sure why, but perhaps the sales were not as
brisk or there were not as many astrophotographers around at the time.

  However, for it's time, it was certainly a great idea andthe kind of innovation that we have come to expect from Meade Instruments over the past several years.

A present innovation of Meade Instruments is their present line of Triplet Apochchromatic refractors.

What makes these rather unique is that they come fully equipped with a Quality dielectric 2 " diagonal, and a Custom
hard shell carrying case as just two included accessories. The robust 3" Crayford 10"1 focusser is another bonus.

Several other manufacturers charge a pretty penny for these extras, so when you get them included in the baseline
price, it's really sweet.

And right now we've got them on Sale! 

But only for the Month of March.  So act now.   All the details

are right here: http://www.khanscope.com/newEquipList.cfm?catID=1&subCatID=1&manID=1

Clear Skies,

Ray "I tawt I saw more contrast", I did, I did, see more contrast!" Khan

PS For the record, I really admired John Diebel. And his engineering team.
Was not so fond of his cigars though, especially when they   were blowing smoke  in my face..