In the early 70's Takahashi began manufacturing high quality telescopes, possibly representing the best Japan has to offer the amateur in mass market telescopes. It took until the early to mid eighties, however, before the name became well known in the U.S. One of their keys to success was the early development, in 1974, of an apochromatic refractor lens made with a synthetic flourite element combined with normal crown glass elements.
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The FC series of telescopes had f/8 calcium flourite doublet objectives in a fully baffled tube. Focusers were buttery smooth and were oversized on the FC-76 and larger models. High quality equatorial mounts were available with bronze worm gear drives, polar scopes and drive correctors as standard. Models indicated the aperture of the objective, and included the FC-50, FC-60, FC-65, FC-76, FC-100 and FC-125. The line of models reached larger apertures, but so did the prices! Later introduced, was the FCT-76, a triplet objective wide field f/6.4 revision of the FC model. | |
| FC-100 | ||
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The FS series of telescopes introduced to the US in 1994 resulted from improvements in the manufacture of flourite objectives. The resulting design resulted in a telescope of similar quality, but at slightly lower production cost. This line maintained the f/8 focal length of the previous objectives, and included the FS-78, FS-102 and FS-128. Again, the sizes get larger, but . . . . | |
| FS-78 | ||