The moon was a delight with the 25mm, and images were sharp all the way down to the 6mm. Both times I have been suitably impressed. It is monsoon season in Arizona so that means I have had 2 clear nights of viewing in a month. I also picked up a Celestron 6mm Plossl to round out my eyepiece collection.
#Meade autostar etx 70 tv#
As Astronomics was backordered on the tripod (and it sucks using the telescope on a TV tray.) I got an #883 "deluxe" tripod cheap from a nice guy on Ebay.
This is my first scope since I had a 70MM refractor as a 10 year old (which only lasted 6 months until I dropped it). I got the Astronomics "ETX-70EC" deal mentioned above as well. As I said, the rating system is a bit goofy. The focuser *is* a bit hard to use, it *does* go through batteries (though apparently not as fast for me as for others who have commented) but I'll still give it a 10 to try to make up for some of the ridiculously low ratings above. And I always use it first in the evening to see what there is to see before I drag out my "big" (well 4" is big for me) refractor. (Buy a 32mm if you only intend to use it only on this scope - 40mm is too long for an f/5.) This scope is super portable. The lack of a finder seems at first to be a problem, but I've used a 40mm eyepiece as a satisfactory "finder." With the Celestron Nexstar Plossl (which I bought to use on another scope) you get over 5 degrees. I couldn't find that anywhere in the owner's manual. Works great! Another helpful feature (especially for daytime) is that you can hit "Go To" after the slew is over to initiate an expanding square search if your object isn't in the field of view. You can use it to align on the Moon or Venus for daytime observing. That can give you a near perfect alignment to find nearby dim objects.
#Meade autostar etx 70 manual#
Two features of the Autostar that might not be obvious from the owners manual: You can "synchronize" after performing your initial alignment by hitting the Enter key for 2 seconds (explained in the manual only where it explains the keys). The Autostar works great! It helps you to learn to find all those Messier objects in the first place (an obvious prerequisite for enjoying them!) and you can also use it to find asteroids (I've found several) and perhaps comets too where the big deal isn't how well you can see them so much as just being able to say you've seen them. (But I sure don't have any trouble seeing Saturn's rings!) It's really good on brighter deep sky objects (Messier catalog, for example) particularly in darker skies. Obviously there will be false color around bright objects, but it really isn't at its best on planets anyway. Optically, this scope does what an f/5 achromatic refractor can be expected to do. And I didn't even get in on the ETX-70EC deal. I'm giving this scope a 10 because it does everything I wanted it to do at a great price. This rating system is a bit goofy, but fun.
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