I once worked at a public observatory whose main telescope was a massive 10" Byers refractor. Ed Byers is world renowned for his extremely high precision gears and telescope mounts (and indeed the mount of this telescope was no exception; very quiet, very reliable, even though it was a simple clock drive design with digital setting circles and no GOTO capability), but the refractor itself was just a standard achromat. As such it suffered from the chromatic aberration one would expect in such an achromat, so even though the views had good angular resolution, color fringes were present on all the planets. If you were to go to an observatory and see through a telescope like that you'd probably come back with all kinds of fantastic stories that in fact stemmed from nothing more than the normal optical imperfections of the telescope.