A Mangin secondary and a front meniscus make a short, fast, flat-field astrograph
Marco Riccardi's design builds on Honders' earlier camera. The front meniscus corrects the spherical primary; the secondary is a Mangin mirror, a lens with its back surface silvered, so light passes through glass twice and picks up extra correction; and a small corrector before focus flattens the field. All the surfaces are spherical, which makes them easier to make to high accuracy than aspheres.
The result is f/3 in a tube little longer than its aperture, with color correction good enough for one-shot color cameras and narrowband filters alike.
Officina Stellare's Veloce series is the Riccardi-Honders in production
| Model | Maker | Aperture | Focal length | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Veloce RH 200 | Officina Stellare (Italy) | 200 mm | 600 mm (f/3) | special order |
| Veloce RH 300 | Officina Stellare (Italy) | 300 mm | 900 mm (f/3) | special order |
| Veloce RH 350 | Officina Stellare (Italy) | 350 mm | 980 mm (f/2.8) | special order |
Prices are US list prices checked in November 2026. Special-order instruments are quoted by the dealer.
Several US dealers list earlier Veloce versions as discontinued, so check which generation a quote covers. Astro-Physics has also built Riccardi-Honders astrographs in small runs. The closest mass-market alternative in speed is Celestron's RASA.
At 600 mm a Veloce RH 200 frames the large nebulae and the nearest galaxies
On an APS-C camera with the Sony IMX571 sensor (23.5 x 15.7 mm, 3.76-micron pixels), a Veloce RH 200 at 600 mm gives a field of 2.24 x 1.5 degrees at 1.29 arcseconds per pixel. 104 of the 110 Messier objects fit in the frame, and 22 of them fill at least a quarter of its short side, among them M7 (Ptolemy Cluster), M33 (Triangulum Galaxy), M16 (Eagle Nebula) and M42 (Orion Nebula).
Most backyard skies blur stars to 2 to 3 arcseconds. Image scales below about 0.7 arcseconds per pixel record no extra detail, so cameras on long focal lengths are usually binned 2x2.
A Riccardi-Honders is a camera lens, not a telescope for the eye
It has no visual back and its corrector expects a camera at a fixed distance. A visual observer gets far more from a large Dobsonian for a small fraction of the price.