The system price includes the LX 200, JMI Motofocus, the focal reducer and equatorial wedge.  It also included any camera specific add-ons I would need to buy.  For example the Pictor models uses the serial port for the camera to computer interface.  To also interface the laptop to the LX 200, I  needed to purchase a PCMCIA adapter to add a second serial port. 

The dollar per arcmin figures are based upon a f10 LX 200 with the f3.3 focal reducer.  Arcmin calculations were based upon the diagonal of the CCD chip size.  The Pictor 416XT is a good performer from both the Sys$ per arcmin and camera $/ per arcmin values.  It did exceed my $5,000 target for the total system price, but not by too much.

The two MX-5 Starlight Xpress cameras met my system price target and performed very well in both system $/arcmin and camera $/arcmin criteria.  Leading me to conclude very good value for the dollar.

Chart #1

Chart #2

Chart #3

Chart #4

Chart #2 through #4 are histograms of the angular size of these objects.  The "Bin" is the angular size in arc-minutes.  The vertical bars are a count of the number of objects in that bin.  For example, in Chart #2, 1,536 of the NSO objects counted have a angular size between 2 and 4 arc-min.  And about 80% have a size less than or equal to 4 arc-min.   98% have a size less than or equal to 12 arc-min.

At f3.3 the MX-5C has a diagonal field of view of about 33 arc-min.  So it can easily image over 98% of the NSO brighter than magnitude 14.  At f10, the MX-5C has a diagonal field of view of about 11 arc-min. 

Charts #3 and #4 show histograms for the size of planetary nebula and Globular clusters.  These show that the MX-5C can image all planetary nebula and about 97% of the Globular clusters on LX 200 operating at f3.3.

All in all I felt that this was pretty good performance.  For those few objects I could not image in a single frame, I could always mosaic the images or put my Nikon film back on the camera.