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Little Mak™ Maksutov Gregorian |
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It should
be noted that I have only ever tested the one Little Mak that I own,
whilst it may be reasonable to assume that this is a representative sample
this is by no means certain!! Preamble - We bought our Little Mak purely for its novelty value, which instantly appealed to my interest in optics. The Little Mak is a unique monocular/telescope; its optical design is Maksutov Gregorian, making it the smallest Maksutov scope on the market. The first thing you notice when seeing this scope is that it is tiny, not much bigger than most eyepieces, in fact it is small enough to fit in a mobile phone pouch. Aside from the size the Little Mak has a couple of other peculiarities that you notice immediately. When looking from the front, instead of the familiar concave meniscus found on other Maksutov designs the meniscus on the Little Mak is convex. As is common with the more familiar Maksutov Cassegrain designs the secondary on the Little Mak is silvered directly onto the inner surface of the meniscus; this being the case it is not immediately obvious what purpose the three point spider serves. Closer examination reveals that this spider supports a baffle tube in front of the secondary. |
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Performance - It would be easy to dismiss the Little Mak as a toy, but as I shall explain later I don't really think that is being entirely fair. Focusing on the Little Mak is achieved by moving secondary mirror relative to the primary. The front end of the scope is on a fine-pitched thread therefore rotating the front assembly facilitates this. The images produced are surprisingly sharp and the right way up, which is the main advantage of a Gregorian design. In bright daylight, particularly when viewing objects silhouetted against a bright background you encounter a fairly annoying dark smudge. What you are seeing is the out of focus silhouette of the relatively large central obstruction. Placing the eye correctly is quite critical when it comes to eliminating this. However, when viewing the Moon, stars, streetlights and daylight viewing at lower light levels I did not notice this problem at all. Most advertisements for this scope make the point that being an all-reflective system the Little Mak is free from chromatic aberration. I found however that this is only true when the eye is quite carefully aligned along the optical axis. As I later found it is the built in eyepiece that lets it down in this respect. The Little Mak also suffers from pincushion distortion, but this only becomes noticeable at the edge of the field of view and is not really objectionable. Carefully unscrewing and removing the eyepiece complete with its own little baffle tube allowed me to replace it with my standard Plóssl eyepieces, which immediately eliminated the chromatic aberration noted earlier. They did not appear to have any affect on the pincushion distortion. At 30x using a 5mm Plóssl the Little Mak still produced pretty sharp images, which isn't too bad for a reflector with a 30mm primary mirror. When I first got this little scope, almost as a joke to myself, I decided to star test it. One of the first things I found is that for a 30mm telescope of this type you need a relatively bright star. The diffraction pattern is, as would be expected, modified by the presence of the spider and the effect rotates as you focus. That aside the star test also revealed that 'out of the box' collimation was spot on (I'm not sure what you could do if it wasn't) and that the optics are very good! Optically it may not be the best scope of its size in the world, but at a similar price it is better that a lot of them. Where the Little Mak really wins is for sheer ingenuity and charm..... |
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