Monday 17 June 2013

Old scope review - Meade ETX80 AT BB

A little while ago I acquired a used ETX80 (the "backpack observatory" edition) for less than £200.  It was an impulse purchase with no real objective in mind.  I guess I still missed my LX200 and wanted a low-cost substitute :)

Now, I read a lot of bad things about these scopes.  The GOTO doesn't work properly, the focusser is poor, the built-in barlow is useless etc etc.

Maybe the bad press has had the effect of flooring my expectations, but my ownership has been hassle-free so far.  Maybe I was lucky but I don't seem to have any of the problems above.  Ok, so the barlow is poor, it's noisy and the slimmer tripod shipped with the Backpack edition isn't great.  But none of those points are issues for me.  The scope will sit quite happily on a garden table (or windowsill!) instead.


SPC900 & netbook were on hand so I thought I'd
take a stab at planetary imaging with my ETX..
  
.. but despite excellent tracking, a short-tube achro
is far from ideal for imaging Saturn!
Saturn through my old LX200
for comparison.  Much better!
I can perform a 1 or 2 star align within a couple of minutes (even on said windowsill!) which is sufficient to allow the GOTO to do its work.  It even managed to hold Saturn on the chip of my webcam for a couple of minutes, and that's with the built-in barlow engaged to achieve focus.  The supplied EP's and diagonal seem of better quality than the usual stuff shipped with new scopes too.

So that's my mini-review - to me it's a great grab 'n go which fits (in it's entirety!) into a little backpack and can be used to view a number of targets.  The hand control can also be used for slow-motion AltAz tracking for terrestrial targets, which is handy too.  I'll keep hold of it despite my efforts to set up an equatorial imaging platform.



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