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K3's Equipment - Telescopes |
| "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have set in place, what is Man that You are mindful of him?" -- Psalm 8:3,4 |
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| 70mm Meade EXT-70AT
Go To telescope. 70mm F5 Achromatic Refractor, focal length 350mm. This is my third telescope dedicated for
travelling. It is a small, light weight scope. Very handy!
Ideal for holidays and frequent transport.
What's in the package:
Eyepieces and magnification:
As you can see, the eypieces and
Barlows are not selected ideally - magnification 87.5 can
be achieved by 2 ways - either by using eyepiece 4mm or
12mm with 3X Barlow. Also magnification 262.5 is too high
for such scope diameter. It would be much better if 4mm
eyepiece would be replaced with 6mm eyepiece - it would
provide magnifications 58.3 and 175. Brief Review The telescope surprised me by its rich boundled accessories, especially when considering its $200 price. With the included accessories you have all what you need for astronomical or terrestrial observation. As it is a small scope, I didn't expect a special performance. Anyway I am quite satisfied with its optical quality. I still have to do more measurements for more detailed comments. When I started the scope for the first time, I was rather disappointed with Autostar #494 controller - it has built in Czech translation, although on box it was stated that hand controller has English language. It would not be such fault, if Czech translations would be correct and would not contain diacritic characters. This resulted in unreadable text in hand controller - some diacritic characters were interpreted as blank spaces, another as different characters and some even as backspaces, so they deleted the characters before them. Furthermore, the length of Czech text was longer than English, so Autostar e.g. showed me temperature on Venus "4" instead of "400°C". I immediately wrote to Meade how to solve the situation. They were very generous and they sent me replacement Autostar module with English text. Now I am very happy! The English Autostar has also richer menu. I like the Autostar very much - it contains almost encyclopedical data - it provides a lot of facts about observed objects. Furthermore if you buy Meade #506 AstroFinder™ Software and Cable Connector Kit, you can control your scope from computer and update object data (e.g. satellite data). The second disappointment (although not as critical as the Czech Autostar menu) was Slovak and Czech instruction manual. It has a lot of mistakes. Just a few curious ones (translated to English):
I like very much the scope size and easiness of transport. The included carrying case is ideal for this purpose.
Power consumption (with 12V power supply):
Conclusion: All in all, with English Autostar
controller now I am very satisfied with the telescope and
it met my requirements. It's an ideal instrument for
travelling - for both terrestrial and astronomical
observations. It's price is only a bit higher than price
of 16x50 binocular. The set up telescope is so light,
that you can hold it and move in one hand.
The EXT-70AT can be used for modest astrophotography. So far I did only a few photos with this scope:
To see more about my decisions about telescopes, look here. Back to Equipment page Computer generated images, real images, drawings and texts are property of the author and may not be reproduced or used without permission of author.
Last Update: 26.06.2007 |
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