The new high-end telescope from Knaeble Engineering
This extraordinary telescope is the result of almost three years of development work. The result is a truss-tube construction Ritchey -Chrétien telescope made of high module carbon-fibre. The connection components for the truss tubes and the adjustment bolts are made of CNC titanium (grade 5). No other telescopes of this class are so light and so temperature and dimensionally stable - even under unfavourable wind conditions and mechanical loads.
The Ritchey -Chrétien telescope (RC) is a special type of Cassegrain optical design that employs hyperbolic primary and secondary mirrors. This design prevents coma - which is a typical aberration of reflecting telescopes. Moreover, the system has a relatively short OTA - a compact design with an f8 aperture ratio, which is both compact and mechanically rigid. The field of view of the Ritchey-Chrétien is also very large. These advantages mean that most modern professional telescopes of are of this design - for example, the four 8.2 meter telescopes of the VLT telescope at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile.
The telescopes have been designed and built by Knaeble Engineering in Berlin. Each instrument has been individually produced - modelled by Dassault CATIA and structurally designed using finite element analysis. Each telescope hence exists twice - in the real world and in the virtual observatory of the database at Knaeble Engineering. This means that each instrument can be individually serviced throughout its life cycle and individual adjustments can be made to it.
Producing high quality Ritchey -Chrétien optics can be problematic, as each mirror is unique in terms of thickness, diameter and curvature. This means that a standardized primary mirror cell will inevitably lead to astigmatism. Knaeble Engineering takes the opposite path and designs a cell specifically for each optical system in which the mirror can sit free of tension.
This Omegon pro Ritchey-Chrétien telescope is equipped with Marcon optics and can be used to operate an observatory to the highest standards:
- optical quality: 1/16 wave PV, 94%
- mirror glass is Schott Suprax
- maximum spot size diameter: 65mm
- The connection between field corrector and OTA can be tilted. The location of the focal plane at the back of the OTA is approximately 255mm.
- Included in delivery:
- RC FC/Ti telescope
- secondary mirror focus system uses a Nanotec microstep linear actuator (resolution 0.67μ)
- Takahashi collimator
- prism rail according to mount requirements
- Losmandy 3 carbon-fibre/aluminium 'torsion box' prism rail for piggyback-style mounting
- carbon-fibre covering
