telescopes plus

William Optics Megrez 80 Refractor

A new short-tube 80-millimeter refractor neatly fills a niche between entrylevel scopes and ultra-expensive apochromatic refractors.

By Alan Dyer

Niche Refractor
Megrez 80 semi-apochromatic refractor with case,
2-inch diagonal, and camera adapter

odays telescope marketplace mounts, and accessories made by William

U.S. Price: $649
seems to be characterized by an Optics. A new name in telescopes, this
William Optics Corporation
ever-widening gulf between low- company is owned and operated by Wilc/o Anacortes Telescope & Wild Bird
cost entry-level telescopes and liam Yang, who first became known to
9973 Padilla Heights Rd.
premium instruments. The
telescope connoisseurs in North
Anacortes, WA 98221
S&T TEST REPORT
gulf exists not only in price
America as the original suppliPhone: 360-588-9000
(90-millimeter f/5.6 refractors cost either er of tube components for the high-end
www.williamoptics.com
$300 or $2,500, with little in between), but TMB refractors designed by Thomas Back.
in many cases also in availability. You can William Optics is now venturing out
get in line for a two-to-three-year wait for with its own line of instruments. The The Megrez Optics
some prestige instruments, or walk into a Megrez 80 refractor, one of the first prod- The Megrez 80 is an 80-millimeter f/6 relocal Wal-Mart and drop a decent scope ucts in the companys catalog, features fractor with an air-spaced doublet objecinto your shopping cart. When you con- optics and fittings designed and manu- tive. (A Megrez 102-mm f/6.8 refractor is
also available for $1,149.) The manufacsider this growing class distinction among factured in Taiwan.
some types of telescopes, an instrument
like the William Optics Megrez 80 is wel- The Megrez 80 semi-apo refractor offers fine optics in a tube assembly with first-class fittings
come indeed. This compact refractor com- and finish. A hallmark of the telescopes appearance is its beautiful satin-pearl paint and gold
bines fine optics and first-class fittings trim. Sold as a tube assembly only, the Megrez is adaptable to a wide range of mounts (an
with a reasonable price. Its a middle- Astro-Physics 400 is shown here). With its dewcap retracted, the Megrez 80 measures a short
class instrument that fills a gulf in to- 1412 inches (37 centimeters) long, not including the star diagonal. Extending the smoothdays market, and its available now.
sliding dewcap (inset) lengthens the tube to 1812 inches (47 cm). For compact packing, the
I tested a unit supplied on loan from focuser can unscrew from the main tube, making the largest component slightly less than 10
Anacortes Telescope and Wild Bird, the inches (25 cm) long. Unique to small refractors, the Megrez focuser can rotate 360 to place the
North American dealer for telescopes, focus knobs and any attached finder at the most convenient angle.

Photographs by Alan Dyer

2001 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope October 2001

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telescopes plus
The test telescope had basic, single-layer coatings applied only to the leading element of the
doublet lens. The rear element of the test scope was uncoated, giving the bright reflections
seen here. William Optics informed us that future Megrez refractors will offer multilayer coatings on the interior lens element.

turer conservatively labels its two Megrez

instruments as semi-apochromatic. The
conservatism is laudable Ive seen similar refractors with significantly higher
levels of color aberration marketed as
apochromats, salesmanship that stretches the definition of what constitutes a
color-free apochromatic refractor.
To judge where the Megrez 80 fits into
the spectrum of refractors, I compared it
to low-cost short-tube instruments (an
f/5 Celestron NexStar 80 and an f/5.6
Orion ShortTube 90), to a conventional
90-mm f/10 achromatic refractor, and
to premium apo refractors, a 105-mm
Astro-Physics Traveler and a Takahashi
Sky 90. Neither the Celestron nor Orion
instrument has any pretensions to being
apochromatic, but they did serve as
benchmarks.
As expected from its midrange price,
the Megrez 80s optical performance fell
midway between that of the low- and
high-end instruments. False color in the
Megrez 80 was well controlled and far
less evident than in the two short-tube
refractors.
The chromatic aberration of the
Megrez looked almost identical in degree
and tint to that shown by the long-focus
achromat (a Chinese-made Skywatcher
90-mm f/10 refractor, which costs about
$300). This may seem surprising to
52

October 2001 Sky & Telescope

some, but it is a testament to how good

the optics can be in conventional achromats with long focal lengths, an appreciation often lost in todays market dominated by short-focus fast optics. The
advantage of the Megrez 80 is that its
special dispersion lenses provide a low
level of chromatic aberration similar to

the f/10 instrument but in a tube short

enough to fit into many camera bags.
Unlike most short-tube achromatic refractors, which I feel perform best when
confined to moderate-power deep-sky
viewing, the Megrez 80 can do it all. I
found this little scope worked well for all
types of observing, from 5-wide panoramic views of Milky Way star fields to detailed close-ups of the Moon and planets.
In focus at high power, Jupiter appeared sharply defined, surrounded only
by a faint blue halo. Jupiters disk looked
nearly white, with just a slight yellowgreen tint. In focus, Mars exhibited almost no false color, presenting its salmonhued disk in pure natural tones set in a
black sky. The Moon appeared neutral
white with just a mild blue rim at its limb.
Bright stars also retained their natural
colors, with no vivid greens or magentas
lurking just outside of focus where they
could flare out in moments of poor seeing. With a 4-mm Radian eyepiece at
120, the star with the most color seen
was blue-white Vega, which had a faint
blue halo. On yellow Arcturus, the unfocused blue light was so slight as to be virtually unnoticeable. When I was racking
through focus on Arcturus, the diffraction
pattern outside of focus appeared as a
pale yellow greenish disk with a bright
pinkish center, while inside of focus the
diffraction disk again looked yellow-green
but with a magenta outer rim, all textbook behavior for this class of refractor.

Standard issue with the Megrez 80 is a pair of hefty tube rings equal to the best rings supplied
with top-of-the-line telescopes. The rings interior surfaces are lined with felt.The rings bolthole patterns should facilitate attachment to any adapter plate or telescope mount. Each ring
is drilled on both its top and bottom surfaces with three metric-threaded holes (bolts are supplied) and two 14-20 holes (nearest the edge).

2001 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

The Megrez tube rings can be bolted to any of the currently popular Chinese-made mounts, including the altazimuth mount (left) sold by
several distributors as the AZ-3 model. It also fits neatly into the tube rings for any of the Chinese-made 90-millimeter refractors. This allowed
the Megrez to mate to the popular EQ-3 mount (right), a good match for the size and weight of this telescope. The Megrez also clamped
neatly into the tube ring of a Celestron NexStar 80 telescope mount (center) to create a new high-class Go To refractor with little to match it
in the market of computerized telescopes.

The Megrez cleanly split the close

components of Epsilon Lyrae, setting the
twin double stars in a dark sky with no
haze or gauziness surrounding the pairs.
Even at only 40, the globular cluster
M13 was nicely resolved into a swarm of
pinpoints, another indication of the telescopes sharp, contrasty optics.
Indeed, the Megrez 80 passed the critical high-power star test with good grades.
At 120 Arcturus appeared as a distinct
Airy disk, with a cleanly defined first diffraction ring and a hint of an outer second
ring that came and went with the seeing.
Just out of focus, where the star test is
most sensitive to on-axis astigmatism, the
Megrez did show a trace of this aberration; the diffraction pattern was slightly
elongated. Rotating the tube proved that
this residual distortion was in the main
lens and not emanating from an air current within the tube. The star test also revealed mild undercorrection of the optics,
yielding a trace of spherical aberration.
While the main optics proved very
good, to conduct star testing I had to use
another star diagonal. The 2-inch diagonal supplied with the scope introduced a
significant level of astigmatism, likely
from a warping of its thin mirror. William
Optics is aware of this problem and in-

formed me it plans to offer a diagonal

with a full-thickness mirror in future
Megrez telescopes at no additional cost.
My principal criticism of the optics is
that the main lens has minimal coatings.
Fully multicoated optics promised on future models will increase the light transmission, wringing the maximum performance out of this small scope. Even so, a
1212-magnitude star was just visible. This
is at the classic limit for an 80-mm telescope, so the Megrez performed just as
expected.
Comparing the Megrez to the top end
of the scale, its level of color correction
and residual aberrations could not match
the premium Takahashi or Astro-Physics
refractors, with their lack of color fringing in or out of focus and absence of any
visible aberrations. Even so, with a price
tag far less than that of high-end 80- to
100-mm instruments, the performance
of the Megrez on all fronts represents an
outstanding value. This is especially true
considering the price includes tube rings,
star diagonal, and a fine soft-sided case.
Megrez Tube Fittings
Upon handling the Megrez my first impression was one of quality. The tube is
coated in a lustrous satin-pearl paint that
2001 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

outclasses many other premium telescopes for luxurious finish. The gold
trim ring adds another touch of class.
The lens cap is metal. I found that a fullaperture solar filter made for the Meade
ETX-90 fits nicely onto the Megrez 80
with the need for just an extra layer of
felt to take up some slack.
The tube interior is well blackened
and baffled, but the baffling is unusual
six wide rings of black foam placed at
intervals down the tube. This is novel,
lightweight, and effective. Through the
eyepiece, I saw little evidence of internal
reflections or glare from bright objects
such as the Moon placed just outside the
field of view.
The 2-inch focuser is a gearless Crayford style with smooth action and lacking backlash, dead spots, or image shift.
As supplied, the focuser did tend to slip
when loaded with a heavy Nagler-class
eyepiece. However, tightening a small
hex screw on the focuser increased the
tension, eliminating the slip without sacrificing ease of focusing. The focuser also
has a knob for locking the drawtube in
place, essential for photography.
The focuser provides a generous 55
mm of travel. Using the supplied William Optics 2-inch diagonal I found that
Sky & Telescope October 2001

53

telescopes plus

Left: Test shots showed that the f/6 Megrez works well
for wide-field astrophotography. Its 480-mm focal length
produces an image 4 wide across a 35-mm camera frame. A
30-second exposure of the 6-day-old Moon plainly reveals
earthshine.
Below: The author made a guided photo of the sky near Vega
taken in a hazy, twilit sky to check the telescope for vignetting and edge-of-field problems. The Megrez produced
minimal vignetting of the frame corners due to light falloff
from the optics, focuser, or camera adapter. The wide field
also proved remarkably flat for a simple doublet lens. Only
stars at the extreme corners of the 35-mm frame (magnified
inset) looked noticeably distorted from field curvature and
astigmatism. Stars within the central 24-mm circle on the film
are perfect pinpoints.

54

all 2-inch eyepieces in my collection

reached focus. These included ones that
demand a fair amount of in-focus travel, such as a 22-mm Type 4 Nagler, to
ones requiring lots of out-focus travel,
such as Orion Lanthanum Superwides.
When I used the supplied 114-inch
adapter in the diagonal, all 114-inch eyepieces reached focus, including eyepieces
with dual-size barrels.
However, other 2-inch star diagonals
with slightly lower profiles did require
pulling some eyepieces out a centimeter
or two in order to have them reach
focus. This was also the case when I inserted a 114-inch mirror-type star diagonal directly into the focuser. In this configuration, most 114-inch eyepieces had
to be pulled out of the diagonal about
two centimeters to focus. But all worked.
My only minor complaint about the
fittings concerns the compression rings
that the Megrez employs to hold the diagonal and eyepiece in place. Compression rings are a fine idea, as they prevent
scratching of eyepiece barrels by locking
screws. But the Megrez compression

rings sometimes caught on the safety

groove of some eyepieces, making it a
fight to extract those eyepieces.
On the plus side, a welcome feature of
the Megrez is that the entire focuser can
rotate 360. This might seem superfluous
after all, if you want the eyepiece in a
different position, why not just turn the
diagonal? But I soon learned to like
the rotating focuser. The feature allows
you to place the focus knobs at the most
convenient angle no matter how the
tube ends up being oriented. This is especially true with a German equatorial
mount, since fixed knobs change their
orientation by 180 when the telescope
is swung from one side of the mount to
the other.
While the focuser body has no provisions for bolting on a conventional finderscope bracket, there is a generous surface area for adding one of todays small
reflex finders using double-sided tape to
attach the finders mounting plate. For
such a short-focal-length scope, thats all
the finder thats needed. The rotating focuser then allows the finder to turn to

October 2001 Sky & Telescope

2001 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

the best angle to sight through, independent of the tube orientation. No more
upside-down finders!
Recommendations
The major selling points of the Megrez 80
are its small size and light weight. With a
tube only 1412 inches (37 cm) long when
the dewcap is collapsed and weighing only
4 pounds (1.8 kilograms) with mounting
rings but without diagonal, the Megrez
80 is one of the most diminutive highperformance scopes on the market.
If you are looking for a durable travel
scope but balk at the $2,000 to $3,000
price tag of some competitive instruments, I highly recommend the Megrez
as a suitable choice. You can forgo that
last costly edge of optical perfection to
get a well-crafted and versatile scope
thats easy to afford. The Megrez 80 is an
impressive debut instrument from a
promising new name in fine optics.
Alan Dyer, a contributing editor of Sky &
Telescope, is also coauthor of Star and Sky, a
new Discovery Channel travel guidebook.