Used Lx200 Meade Telescopes

Ask Frank: Where can we go to see a meteor shower?

Tickets cost £8 for adults and £5 for children aged ten and over. Booking is essential - for further information visit www.breconbeacons.org .

There is a wide selection of accommodation in the area, including holiday cottages with telescopes that can be used by the guests. Even better, the owner of the Penrhos B&B hotel in Libanus ( www.penrhosbandb.co.uk ) has a PhD in astrophysics and offers lectures and evenings looking at the night sky. There’s an observatory in the garden kitted out with a 30cm Meade LX200 high-tech telescope and it has a computer-control system to help visitors see as much of the night’s sky as possible.

Groups of up to four people can book stargazing evenings for £20. Accommodation starts at £70 per night for two people sharing a double room.

Think Sicily (020 7377 8518, www.thinksicily.com ) has a good range of villas, such as Lilli, which is about a 20-minute walk from Mondello. This charming resort has some excellent restaurants, lively cafes and a fabulous sandy beach. The villa itself has beautiful lawned gardens - an ideal play area for children. Lilli costs from £587 per person based on ten people sharing.

Alternatively, Badia is a restored 18th Century winery surrounded by vineyards, citrus orchards and olive groves with views of Mount Etna. It costs £604 per person based on ten sharing and is made up of three guesthouses and the main villa.

Drop him a line at Ask Frank, Mail on Sunday Travel, Northcliffe House, Derry Street, London W8 5TS; askfrank@mailonsunday.co.uk; fax 020 7938 2894.

We regret that due to the large number of requests we receive, we may not be able to reply personally to all correspondence.

#1: BEST PRICE USED MEADE TELESCOPES | Meade 16-Inch LX200-ACF (f ...

Aperture: 16-Inch. Focal Length: 4064mm. Focal Ratio: f/10. Zero Image-Shift Microfocuser, 2-Inch Diagonal Mirror w/UHTC, 26mm Series 5000 5-Element Plössl Eyepiece, 18v AC Adapter. The most widely used research quality telescope now features the most advanced optical system. Meade’s LX200-ACF brings Advanced Coma-Free (ACF) optics within reach of aspiring astronomers everywhere. Nearly every observatory reflector in the world uses an aplanatic (coma-free) optical system like the Ritchey-Chrétien (RC), including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Now you can own similar optics to what the professionals use. The LX200-ACF includes all the field-proven features of the LX200 including GPS, Primary Mirror Lock, Oversized Primary Mirror, SmartDrive; Smart Mount, AutoStar II and more. The new LX200-ACF. It’s the biggest news in astronomy since, well, the LX200.The “advanced” in Advanced Coma-Free. A traditional Ritchey-Chrétien (RC) is a type of reflector that delivers a coma-free, flat field of view via hyperbolic primary and secondary mirrors. Because the mirrors in these telescopes have always been very expensive to make, few amateur astronomers could enjoy them. Fortunately, Meade engineers developed a radical new Advanced Coma Free design by combining a hyperbolic secondary mirror with a corrector-lens-and-spherical-primary-mirror combination that performs as one hyperbolic element. This ACF design produces a coma-free, flat field of view that rivals traditional RC telescopes at a fraction of the cost. The design even eliminates diffraction spikes and improves astigmatism, both of which are inherent in the traditional RC design. When reviewing Meade’s LX200-ACF Advanced Coma Free, Sky and Telescope magazine said, “ [It] does indeed perform like a [Ritchey-Chrétien]. The difference between the off-axis images (compared to a Schmidt-Cassegrain) was dramatic to say the least.

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