In the late 90’s we brought out a bigger brother to the very successful OMC140 Maksutov Cassegrain, the OMC200. This telescope was designed purely for planetary and lunar observing.

The OMC200 is a Rumak Maksutov.

The Rumak uses a separate secondary mirror, this enables a greater amount of flexibility in the design, it also allows a major feature of any Maksutov to be ‘miniaturised’, the secondary mirror. Typical Maksutovs have secondary mirrors which vary in size from around 26% up to a rather large, 45%. The OMC200 has a 22% secondary mirror, 4.8% obstruction to the light path.

What effect has this on the image quality? It enables a reflecting telescope to be as close as possible to a refractor’s performance in terms of MTF (modular Transfer Function) MTF is the data which determines how much low contrast detail can be seen in an image, e.g. faint bands on Jupiter. Telescopes with MTF curves which are less effective than the OMC200 reduce the amount of detail visible in an image.

MTF has nothing to do with PV wavefront accuracy, that can be measured on a Zygo for instance, MTF is far more difficult to measure but, the MTF plot of the OMC200 and the PV wavefront results guarantee you an incredible journey into the best planetary and lunar views you might possibly ever see in an Earth based telescope. (see RMS Spot Radius vs Field Plot below)

Why did we stop making it then?

The corrector lens in an OMC200 has to be virtually flawless. The corrector glass we buy when making the OMC200 fell into this category but, We only take the best quality glass available and do not accept any defects which will effect the performance. This glass has a very high value, this is transferred into the image giving the user great detail and contrast not seen before.