Meade ETX Equipment

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Observations

• Total Eclipse 1999

• Sun Spots 2000

• Northern Lights 2002

• Photos of the Moon 1999

• Eclipse of the Moon 2003

• Photos of the Moon 2005

• Photos of the Moon 2009

• Photos of the Moon 2010

• Venus Transit 2004

• Saturn 2010

• ISS 2009

Information

• Meade ETX-90EC Information

• Meade ETX-90EC Equipment

• Meade 10" Dobson Information

• Sky-Watcher 5" Dobson Information

• Telescope Calculations

• Astronomy Links

Ricoh GXR and Astronomy

• GXR and A12-50 - Part 1

• GXR and A12-50 - Part 2

On this page, I show photos of my previous telescope equipment, a Meade ETX-90EC telescope and futher equipment that I bought in Germany. Furthermore, I make some notes about the pieces of the equipment.

Photos of the Equipment

Click the photos for seeing larger versions of the photos - the larger photos appear in a new window that has to be closed manually.

Meade ETX 90EC with Angular Viewfinder (optional) and 26mm Super Plössl Eye Piece
		With manual and remote control (center)
The screw on the right is for focusing, in the base there is a lever for fixing the telescope horizontally
Bag for the Telescope		Table Tripod (optional)
Angular Viewfinder	Sun Filter
Autostar Computer 497 (left, optional) and Remote Controls (right)
Connection Cables (optional), Exchanged Mechanical Part
Newly Bought Plössl Eye Pieces (40mm, 15mm and 9.5mm)
Complete Equipment (Without Bag)
Photos Using the 1:50 Method (Camera Held at Eye Piece)
		Please do not take these photos seriously!

Notes About the Equipment

Meade ETX Telescope and Viewfinder

I had learned about the ETX-90EC on the Internet and wanted to own it, because it was compact and nevertheless powerful. As the telescope was hard to get at in Germany, I used a conference visit to Pittsburgh in 1999 to buy it at the airport briefly before take-off (recently, I learned that I was not the only person who bought an EXT at the airport in the USA). The German customs, however, demanded a lot on money from me... I also bought the Autostar computer and a bag for the telescope.

The telescope comes with a straight viewfinder. When it stands on a table and the tube is pointing upwards, you have more or less to squat down below the tabletop to be able to look through the viewfinder (the eye piece itself has an angle of 90 degrees and can be look through comfortably). Therefore, I bought an angle viewfinder and replaced the straight viewfinder with it. Now I had another problem: viewfinder and eye piece were so close together that I could only look through my longer eye pieces (e.g. the 26mm and 40mm eye pieces) comfortably - I also had to use my left eye. Therefore, I attached the viewfinder at an oblique angle to increase the distance between it and the eye piece - not an ideal solution...

Table Tripod

If you simply put the EXT on a table, you get a so-called altazimut mount, which does not allow for tracking star movements automatically. The table tripod (or any "real" tripod) allows for an equatorial mount with polar alignment, for which an automatic tracking of stars works, provided it works at all. The ETX is infamous for having a poor mechanical construction with a lot of slack, and I never really used it at all. Usually, I used the ETX like a kind of Dobson telescope, searching and tracking stars and planets by hand. Consequently, I bought a Dobson telecope in 2009...

Sun Filter

One of the typical uses for an EXT are observations of the sun - however, a sun filter is MANDATORY in order to avoid damage to your eyes! With my additional 40mm eye piece, I could take photos of the complete sun disk.

Examples (return using Browser Back)

Remote Control

The ETX telescop was delivered with a simple remote control. As the was a lot of slack in the mechanical parts, controling the telescopes was sometimes like a lottery. In addition, you have to consider that the image that you see is side-inverted (but not upside down as in many other telescopes). This requires some time to get used to...

Autostar 497 Computer

As already mentioned, I bought the Autostar computer aleady at Pittsburgh airport in 1999. In principle, the computer allows to "go to" thousands of starts autoamitcally, provided you use the correct mount. I never really tried that for a number of reasons. I failed already during the alignment phase, because the section of the sky that we can see here is too small (you need to align using three stars that are fairly distand from each other). I used another less precise method and also failed...

Connection Cables

In Germany, I bought a set of connection cables. One can be used for cloning your Autostar settings to another Autostar computer. I wouldn't have bought it if it had not been included in the set...

The second cable served for connecting the Autostar to a PC using a serial port. But serial ports have vanished and replaced by USB ports... Another problem that I encountered was that I owned an Apple Macintosh, not a PC. However, software updates were only made available for the Windows platform. Meade annonced a universal Java version of the updater but never made it available... Using Windows emulators, I made one or the other update, but never managed to have the Autostar computer software "up-to-date." Moreover, often the updater got stuck...

Eye Pieces

I bought three used Plössl eye pieces at Astro-Himmel, Sulzbach:

• 9.5mm Meade Plössl Series 3000
• 15 mm Plössl of unknown origin
• 40 mm Plössl Pro-Optic

The 40mm eye piece seems to be very good (I still keep it) and offered a large and clear field of view (it was fairly expensive). However, due to its long focal length older people are no longer able to oversee the whole field of view - that's really a pity...

The 15mm and 9.5mm eye pieces offered more magnification than the default 26mm eye piece but did not bring any additional advantages (perhaps there was already "dead" magnification). Perhaps, in our region the air has to many turbulences, and the sky is definitely spoilt by light pollution.

Bag

I bought the bag already in Pittsburgh. The ETX just fits into it, there is not much room left for accessories. I kept the ETX in this bag..

Issues

As already mentioned, the ETX is infamous for having a poor mechanical construction (the optics are praised, however). As a result, a plastic part broke. First, I glued it - that worked! - but then I decided to contact Meade and ask for a replacement part. This was delivered at no cost. As this problem was well known on the Internet, I found instructions for repairing the ETX there. The instructions helped me to replace the defective part.

On the Internet, there were also instructions for improving the mechanical constructions, but I did not dare to apply their recommendations.

Bought for...

I sold the complete equipment (I kept the 40mm eye piece) through Astrocom for 120 EUR.