Meade ETX-125PE Telescope

best meade etx-125pe Telescope
meade etx-125pe telescope reviews

Until now, the Stargazer's two biggest challenges to enjoying the night sky have been aligning their telescope and finding objects. Meade's new ETX-Premier Edition eliminates these two challenges and makes astronomy as easy as pushing a button - right out of the box. Want to see a hard to find deep space galaxy? Simply push a button. The same goes for planets, stars, nebulae and more. Just pick an object you want to observe, press a button, and then AutoStar will automatically point your telescope and put it right in your eyepiece.

The scope is portable enough to take anywhere, and much easier to use than a Dobsonian or Newtonian scope just due to the size.

The Autostar controller is an amazing piece of equipment. It has literally tens of thousands of objects that once the scope is set to true North, will not only find them by aiming the scope with motors, but will track them at the same speed the Earth is moving.

You can look for comets, asteroids, nebula, star clusters, and galaxies, not to mention satellites and the International Space Station. Once this thing is aligned it is very precise as to where it points.

Ease of use is limited to ones experience with scopes and patience, but in short time you will find yourself setting the scope up and calibrating it to true North, and using the controller.

The controller has an easy to use menu and sorts out objects by classification. Want to look for the Ring Cluster? Set it and go. Want to see the Crab Nebula? Set the button and watch the scope skew itself and about 8 of ten times the object will be right in the view. The other two times it will be so close a small tap on the controller direction will find it.

meade etx-125pe telescopes

Optical Design Catadioptrics Optical Diameter 127 mm
Finderscope Red-Dot
Focal Length 1900 mm
Max Useful Magnification x 500
Mount Type Altazimuth

I have seen some great optics before, and Meade is above average for it's class, but the quality is still much lower than a high end refractor like a Zeiss, or a Russian Maksutov like Intes. But then again, you will pay much much more for the Zeiss and still not have all the options. And the 125mm lens offers a nice clear view and better stabilization than my experience with the Meade 90mm ETX scope.

This scope is great for beginners and offers a wonderful variety of accessories and options. It is portable and fun to use, and because of the Autostar controller opens up entire new worlds to us here on Earth. The field of vision is satisfying for most objects, and the optics are clear and easy to make out.

The cool thing is for only about $40.00 you can get an electronic eye piece that is basically a digital camera that fits into the scope as any eye piece would. It displays on your computer the image you are looking at and allows easy and fast pictures of what you see through the scope. It is in black and white, but that is all you see through a scope anyway due to the human eye being too fast to capture most light in stellar objects.