Oak Creek Observatory

Meade LX200 Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope

In the Beginning... The Meade LX200 12" telescope is a wonder of the world and a marvelous machine, however mine didn't work right out of the box and the first thing it did was to bury the OT into the fork. Instead of blowing a fuse it blew the mother board. Meade sent me the usual electronics package and I first replaced the main board to see what would happen. As I was pulling the chips I noticed that one chip had a recessed pin that probably never made contact. After fixing that and putting it back into the new board It all worked as it should. Amazing. But first I had to polarize it as I was using it on the wedge on a permanent mount in the observatory. Finally, after several nights of fooling with the wedge using shims and looking at the North Star it looked pretty good. At that point it went right to objects using the keypad. So far so good. I was using the one star calibration method after that since the mount was always polarized. Then the real fun began. I hooked up a notebook computer to the LX200 and using The Sky software was able to control the telescope from the computer. Then it was time to add the ST-7 camera. The first thing I noticed about the camera was the rather flimsy connector or nose piece that was to connect to an eyepiece holder. My holder would not hold the heavy camera without having it turn on me. After a short session with that I removed the nose piece and put in the optional fitting in the camera and connected it to the telescope and started to take pictures. By that time I had the correct latitude and long. and the time to the second programmed into the telescope computer. I used Skypro to control the camera and acquire the images. You can put The Sky and Skypro in and link them together so that you can click between them very easily if you are using the Windows versions. The images were OK but I found that I sometimes had to hunt for the objects and that the tracking was not good for more than about 20 seconds at best. So back to the drawing board. I started to use a f 6.3 focal reducer and trained the error pretty much out of the RA drive using the Smart Drive. Things looked a lot better and I was able to start really using it to take some nice images. Later still I used a f 3.3 focal reducer and it is really gives a large FOV ~ 15x25 arc min. and is quite good to the edge of the image. Then I could do much larger objects like large galaxies, etc. but not M31 as it is too large. Large nebulae are still better on film in order to get everything in on one frame. This is how I finally figured out how to set up for each session. First I got the telescope finder so that it was lined up with the camera, after programming the camera from the notebook for the temperature etc. and getting everything working I then find a known star and find it in the finder using the hand controls on the keypad. Then I take an image 1 or 2 seconds and get it in the middle of the computer screen by using the keypad again. Sometimes it takes several images to get it right. When that is done I tap in the correct star number into the keypad and using the polar mode push the enter key once. After the star data comes up I hit the enter key again and hold it until it says coordinates matched. At that point I link the computer using The Sky software to the telescope computer. For the rest of the night I can find anything using the computer to drive the telescope. I only use the keypad after that to bring objects closer to the center of the screen or to focus using the motorized focus control (Meade). After slewing to a new object I always look to see if the telescope is pointing into space through the slit in the dome and not at the dome wall. If not I move the dome using the drive motors using the control box which is on the desk next to the computer. The next day I download the images to my desktop computer and do a little image processing if any is needed.

Time for repair... I took my telescope into Meade last month and left it for them to repair the RA motor and or motor board. It's about a 560 mile drive from our house so my wife and I decided to do the beaches on the way back and make a small vacation out of it. Meade said it would take about a month but after three weeks it was finished and so we made another trip down to pick it up. We just went down and back that time in one day. We timed it so that we missed all the rush hours in LA, SF, Stockton and Sacramento. It worked out fine and we blasted through LA at 65 mph in about 90 minutes each way. Irvine is way down in the southern end just off the San Diego freeway. Total trip was about 1120 miles that day but it was beautiful with all the wild flowers and citrus groves in bloom throughtout the central valley. The following is my imperssion of Meade,Inc.:

After almost 3 years, hundreds of hours of use and thousands of goto's the RA motor was starting to sound strange and finally went out. I have no complaints at all since it worked very well for all that time and faithfully found the most obscure objects that that were obtainable from my location. Any electronic device will eventially fail at some point. I could have sent them the electronics but since we live within driving range I thought that they could do a better job of putting it back together. And they did. Not only does the motor run smoothly but they also did other little things like clean the corrector plate which I had not touched since new. Also, the focus seems to be lighter to the touch. It's the same scope but looks and works like new. They charge a set fee of $200 for the service and it's well worth it. Since I delivered and picked up there was no transportation fee. Each round trip cost us about $28 in gas for our Escort hatchback. The scope in it's padded case fit perfectly in the back of the car. Some people probably thought that we were transporting a coffin. Meade has a nice facility with a lot of space in a light industrial area of Irvine. While I was waiting to pick up the scope I managed to take a tour of the part of the plant near the loading area. They don't have actual tours as they are not set up for it and it would be disrupting to do it. It is a very busy place and very business-like at all levels. I saw machining and drilling and mirror work being done. The reception area has a lady doing phone work and with calls coming in every minute or so she was very busy. They have a lot of demo scopes set up near that area for people to view and that is interesting. I met John Piper and gave him some pictures I had taken with various Meade scopes. He is the one you talk to when asking anything about the LX 200's. He is a very personable but extremely busy man and took the time to talk with me for a short time. I wonder if he has that phone attached to his head 24 hours a day. Needless to say I was very impressed with Meade, Inc.