Hi Ed, I've got about a 1 year-old 10" Meade S/N. At low power, it has a nice wide field of view, and as you point out, represents an amazing amount of bang for the buck- except for the American made optics, the rest is made in China (or at least the mount & mechanics are): http://www.meade.com/catalog/lxd55/lxd55_schmidt-newtonian.html http://iss-transit.sourceforge.net/firewire-webcam.html You can certainly point the thing this way or that manually, but I never use mine in that mode, unless I'm doing some kind of calibration. A small lawn-mower battery will run the thing essentially forever. I find the built-in satellite tracking software totally worthless, at least for tracking the ISS. It starts out pointing in the right direction, but then "tracks" into the ground, when it should be tracking into the sky!!! GOTO, however, works great, once you figure out what "German North" really means (Meade's documentation leaves a lot to be desired, at least in some areas), and get the scope tweaked up correctly, so that the optical axis is closely parallel to the R.A. axis, when the declination is as close to 90° as you can get it (the documentation at least is precise about the alignment procedure). There's also a "high accuracy" mode, so that if you're trying to find Neptune, for example, the scope will first GOTO a reasonably bright nearby star, let you center that, then it'll move to center the dim object you're trying to find. My WorldView program: http://iss-transit.sourceforge.net http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=70993 has the guts of what's necessary to precisely compute the positions of low-orbiting satellites (I haven't implemented the high-orbit variant of SGP4), and the protocol for communicating with the telescope in software is well documented, so "before long" I expect I'll get around to writing a Java program that will be able to accurately track low earth-orbit satellites: http://www.meade.com/support/CommandSet.html http://www.meade.com/support/LX200CommandSet.pdf Of course, "tracking" geosynchronous satellites is mostly just a matter of using some decent software (e.g., Rob Matson's SkyMap, or Bill Gray's Guide 8) to figure out where they are in the first place. As far as I know, the Autostar controller doesn't "do" altitude & azimuth; nor to my (limited) knowledge does the firmware support altitude & azimuth. Needless to say, specifying altitude & azimuth would be the most convenient way to command a telescope to follow a low earth-orbit satellite, such as the ISS. Tom ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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