After finding my 115mm refractor a bit limiting, I was considering a 150mm to 180mm telescope, but could not quite convince myself that a Mak-Cas was right for me. Then one day in early September I was looking for birding binoculars on the Astronomy Plus website when I saw that there was a Takahashi Mewlon 180c was in stock. I phoned Astronomy Plus to confirm that they indeed had one and then bought it; Mewlons do not come up very often. It arrived safe and sound two days later. I have used it on three nights since (total 14 hours) with it mounted on a Vixen SXD2 mount. That seems like a perfect pairing. I've only used it with 1 1/4 and 2 inch Pentax XW eyepieces covering 72x to 309x, or more importantly 0.9 to 0.2 degree field of view and it works very nicely with these and a 2 inch diagonal. I left the telescope outside for ninety minutes to cool before using it and the performance has been really impressive. My primary interest is in variable stars and deep objects (I'm currently going through the Herschel 400), so on the first two nights all my targets were variable stars, the very first was the nova in Sge. In estimating the brightness of the variables I found out that with this telescope I could see down to magnitude 13.6 stars quite comfortably at the zenith from my suburban sky. I would expect to do better at a dark sky site. On the third night I looked at Saturn and the image was pleasingly sharp, Neptune a little blue dot like always, but sharp, I'm looking forward to view Jupiter in a few weeks; its a much more detailed planet than Saturn. I also looked at some deep sky objects M56, M57 in Lyra, M52, M103, open star clusters in and Cassiopeia and was very pleased with the results. The open clusters showed nice contrast with pin-point stars on a very dark background.
At f/12 this telescope has a relatively narrow field of view and I would not recommend it to anyone looking for wide field viewing of the night sky. However, for targets where a wide field is not necessary, such as planets, globular cluster, planetary nebulae, open star clusters and many many variable stars, this telescope really performs well, with nice high-contrast views. Taking that performance together with the fact telescope it is light weight and goes well with my SXD2 mount I have to say that I am very satisfied with my Mewlon 180c.
Last, but not least I, I would like to give a shout out and thanks to Astronomy Plus for their first class advice and friendly service.
