Meade ETX-90EC Telescope
- Optical Diameter: 90 mm
- Max Useful Magnification: x 325
- Finderscope: Optical
- Mount Type: Altazimuth
- Focal Length: 1250 mm
- Optical Design: Catadioptrics
Available From
Why are these offers here?
Lowest Price!
- Overview
-
Reviews
- Compare Prices
User ReviewRead All Reviews »
Finally, A Childhood Fantasy Fulfilled!
Pros
High Quality, Great Design, Opens Up The Heavens
Cons
Can Get Expensive
Recommended it?
Yes
Meade ETX-90EC
The relative explosion of consumer-oriented telescopes in the past few years has been a boon to the child in all of us who has always wanted to fulfill that dream of traveling to the moon and beyond. Remember back to age 7? Remember when you were just sure that you wanted to be a firefighter or an astronaut? Well, it appears that not all that many of us actually achieve the firefighter goal and many fewer traveled anywhere near the moon.
But thanks to companies such as Meade and its wonderful ETX-90EC Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope, many of the wonders of the universe that previously had been reserved only for those with the financial means to buy a very expensive telescope or those with access to university or similar astronomical facilities are now practically on the doorstep of many.
There is a tremendous amount to say about this wonderful scope. I will attempt to measure the amount of dry facts and figures with my own commentary. I'll also do my best to explain some of the terms.
The Basics
The Meade ETX-90EC is a 90 mm Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope with built-in motor drives to control both telescope axes. It is supplied with an 8 x 21 mm viewfinder and a Meade Series 4000 Super Plossl 26mm eyepiece which achieves a 48X magnification.
Some additional specs (as supplied by Meade's literature):
Maximum Practical Visual Power: 325X
Resolving Power: 1.3 arc secs.
Secondary Mirror Obstruction: 27.9 mm
Tube Body Material: Aluminum
Power: 8 AA Batteries
Mounting Material: Reinforced high-impact ABS
Weight: 4.2 kg (9.2 lbs.)
Additional accessories that you'll probably want to purchase include Meade's Deluxe Field Tripod, the Autostar 147 unit, the hard carrying case designed specifically to protect the ETX-90EC and a Barlow lens (more on these later). Items that I don?t see being as necessary, but that you might also want to purchase, include Meade's Table Tripod (depending on your situation) and an additional eyepiece or two.
Finally, it is worth noting that the ETX-90EC utilizes a 90 mm primary mirror (hence the designation ?90EC"). In a telescope, bigger is better (as long as production quality is maintained). The larger the mirror, the greater the light collection abilities of the scope, the more you?re going to be able to see in the heavens. By the way, 90 mm isn't huge, but it is highly respectable. And a quality 90 mm scope is preferable to an inferior larger scope any day.
Ease Of Use
The ETX-90EC is a wonderful telescope for beginners through somewhat advanced amateurs -- probably 90% of us. As opposed to some of the more ?mass-market? telescopes often available at chain retailers, this scope includes features which will keep the user happy for many years or potentially forever.
Upon opening the telescope packaging materials, you?ll find everything ready to go. All you have to do is insert the batteries, viewfinder, eyepiece and electronic controller in their appropriate locations on the main body of the scope. You?ll then need to ?align? the viewfinder to ensure that what you?re seeing through the viewfinder is an accurate representation of what you?ll see through the eyepiece. (The eyepiece is the optical unit through which you look to see all of those wonderful distant objects. The viewfinder is a essentially a little tiny telescope-type device mounted alongside the barrel of the telescope proper. It is used to put the object you wish to view -- say, Jupiter or Vega -- in the general area of view of the telescope so that you don?t have to search the sky for minutes on end to find the object you wish to view. Trust me. If you don?t use the viewfinder you?ll get very frustrated.)
The alignment procedure takes about 10 minutes, and unless you remove the viewfinder or bang it against the floor (which you REALLY don?t want to do for reasons which I hope are obvious with a carefully-designed optical instrument), you won?t need to realign it. You?ll also need to ?train the motor drives of the telescope the first time you use it. Training the drives allows the telescope to respond correctly to the buttons pushed on the electronic controller. Again, this is a procedure which requires about 10 minutes of your time, and you should rarely if ever have to do it again.
But, What Can I See?
There?s no one answer to this question, as it depends on your viewing location. If you live in or near a city, be prepared to see just the basics or to take a trip to take a trip far into the suburbs. Light pollution is the astronomer?s greatest foe, and the ETX-90EC, being a relatively powerful scope will only magnify the effects of light pollution. In addition, if you ARE in a city, you?re going to find that the scope imperceptibly ?wiggles? -- causing stars to look as though they?re doing a jig. A general rule of thumb is that the more powerful the scope, the greater the impact of vibrations. Trust me, I occasionally use my scope on my roof deck and the impact of trucks 50 meters away causes the image to shake. So, for best results, head to the hills, or if you are lucky enough to live in a rural or relatively rural area, you should be all set.
Using the ETX-90EC, you?ll see the obvious objects in the sky: the moon, the stars, and the planets. You want to see the rings of Saturn? You?ve got it. How about the moons of Jupiter? You?ve got them also. How about taking a close look at the craters of the moon? Simple. And it looks like it is just across the street. Mars? Yep, it looks pretty red.
Then Start The Additions To the Telescope & Withdrawals From Your Bank Account
But the real wonder of viewing through the ETX-90EC comes when you spend the additional $149 to purchase the Autostar 147 control unit to replace the electronic controller that is supplied with the telescope. The standard controller allows you to control the direction in which the scope is pointed and also allows you to control the speed with which the scope slews (moves) around the sky so that as you are seeking a celestial object you won?t miss it by moving around the sky too quickly.
The Autostar unit, however, is a beautiful Mercedes compared to the Chevrolet that is the standard controller. In addition to the capabilities of the basic unit, the Autostar includes a massive database of celestial objects with which you have the ability to do AMAZING things. Upon starting a viewing session, the Autostar unit takes you through a 5 minutes alignment process by which it determines your exact position on the Earth (yes, really) thereby enabling you to punch into the unit a command telling it to point the telescope at a particular nebula, planet, comet, star, or whatever. It is amazing. You tell it to point at the Big Dipper, it does it. Want to see how Neptune is looking tonight? Push a few buttons, the scope slews around the sky for a few moments, stops, beeps at you to let you know it is done, and you?re looking at Neptune.
In addition, the Autostar unit gives you the option of taking a series of guided tours of the galaxy, with a focus on what is going to be particularly good viewing from your position on the particular night you are viewing.
One of the most fascinating capabilities of the Autostar-equipped ETX-90EC is its ability to find and track satellites and other man-made objects throughout the sky. I have to admit that I have yet to do this, because you have a very short window of opportunity to do this due to the speed with which these objects travel overhead and because when they DO appear where I live it is generally about 2:30 in the morning.
One final note about the Autostar unit is that it is fully updatable for free with information from Meade?s web site (and the purchase, for about $20, of a special connector cable). Just download the update file to your computer, connect the ETX-90EC to your computer,run the self-contained update program, and you?re done. The updates are worth it, because Meade adds impressive new functionalities to the Autostar unit from time to time.
To utilize the telescope in just about any practical manner, you?re going to want to purchase the Meade Deluxe Field Tripod at an amount which I believe was approximately $190. No, you can?t use a standard photographic tripod. It won?t work with this scope, and you probably would want to use it anyway. This tripod enables you to put the telescope into ?polar alignment? mode, one of the two alignment modes possible with this telescope (the other is known as alt-az alignment). I?m not going to get into the technicalities of alignment modes in this review, but I provide this information for those of you who might care. Trust me, if you don?t know what this means, you?re probably not going to care.
Finally, you might want to spend just a bit more money (about $35, I believe) for a Barlow lens, which is essentially a barrel-type device which extends the magnification of the eyepiece used in the ETX-90EC. This will probably be enough magnification for just about any user of this scope. In fact, it may be TOO MUCH magnification in some cases, as it requires the scope to be on extremely steady ground and just about any vibration will make the image you see appear as though it is being impacted by a herd of elephants parading by. Remember, in a telescope, it is not the magnification that is important (as many of the inexpensive and lesser-designed discount telescope designers will lead you to believe), it is the amount of light that is collected by the device (in this case denoted by the 90 mm).
The Downsides
The ETX-90EC is noisy. Yep, when those gears are cranking away slewing the scope around the sky, you can hear it. Does this matter? No. It has no impact on the quality of the scope or its optics, but it is noisy.
It can become downright expensive. The list price of the ETX-90EC is $595, which really is NOT a bad price for a scope of this quality with these capabilities. Until recently, it was next to impossible to get any discount of of this price, but I?ve recently seen some softening of the pricing at some stores, and you might be able to find it for $545 or so. But then add in the field tripod, which you?ll really need, and the Autostar unit, which you REALLY, REALLY, REALLY want, and maybe a Barlow lens, and you?re heading close to $1,000.
The Autostar updates presently are available only to users of Windows-based computers. For Macintosh users, like me, you?re out of luck and need to find a Windows-based friend whom you can bribe with an evening of celestial viewing. Meade has had a notice on their web site for over a year that a Java-based update, which WILL work on the Macintosh, is ?coming soon.? But it has been a long time in coming.
The Conclusion
I love this telescope. It is habit forming. And it has been something of a financial drain. But I?ve been able, finally, to indulge one of my childhood fantasies just about whenever I wish. I have only touched on about half of what I probably should have written about this scope, but you probably don?t want to hear me drone on.
My advice? If you?re in the market for a scope and you have the money, go get it. You won?t be sorry.
The relative explosion of consumer-oriented telescopes in the past few years has been a boon to the child in all of us who has always wanted to fulfill that dream of traveling to the moon and beyond. Remember back to age 7? Remember when you were just sure that you wanted to be a firefighter or an astronaut? Well, it appears that not all that many of us actually achieve the firefighter goal and many fewer traveled anywhere near the moon.
But thanks to companies such as Meade and its wonderful ETX-90EC Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope, many of the wonders of the universe that previously had been reserved only for those with the financial means to buy a very expensive telescope or those with access to university or similar astronomical facilities are now practically on the doorstep of many.
There is a tremendous amount to say about this wonderful scope. I will attempt to measure the amount of dry facts and figures with my own commentary. I'll also do my best to explain some of the terms.
The Basics
The Meade ETX-90EC is a 90 mm Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope with built-in motor drives to control both telescope axes. It is supplied with an 8 x 21 mm viewfinder and a Meade Series 4000 Super Plossl 26mm eyepiece which achieves a 48X magnification.
Some additional specs (as supplied by Meade's literature):
Maximum Practical Visual Power: 325X
Resolving Power: 1.3 arc secs.
Secondary Mirror Obstruction: 27.9 mm
Tube Body Material: Aluminum
Power: 8 AA Batteries
Mounting Material: Reinforced high-impact ABS
Weight: 4.2 kg (9.2 lbs.)
Additional accessories that you'll probably want to purchase include Meade's Deluxe Field Tripod, the Autostar 147 unit, the hard carrying case designed specifically to protect the ETX-90EC and a Barlow lens (more on these later). Items that I don?t see being as necessary, but that you might also want to purchase, include Meade's Table Tripod (depending on your situation) and an additional eyepiece or two.
Finally, it is worth noting that the ETX-90EC utilizes a 90 mm primary mirror (hence the designation ?90EC"). In a telescope, bigger is better (as long as production quality is maintained). The larger the mirror, the greater the light collection abilities of the scope, the more you?re going to be able to see in the heavens. By the way, 90 mm isn't huge, but it is highly respectable. And a quality 90 mm scope is preferable to an inferior larger scope any day.
Ease Of Use
The ETX-90EC is a wonderful telescope for beginners through somewhat advanced amateurs -- probably 90% of us. As opposed to some of the more ?mass-market? telescopes often available at chain retailers, this scope includes features which will keep the user happy for many years or potentially forever.
Upon opening the telescope packaging materials, you?ll find everything ready to go. All you have to do is insert the batteries, viewfinder, eyepiece and electronic controller in their appropriate locations on the main body of the scope. You?ll then need to ?align? the viewfinder to ensure that what you?re seeing through the viewfinder is an accurate representation of what you?ll see through the eyepiece. (The eyepiece is the optical unit through which you look to see all of those wonderful distant objects. The viewfinder is a essentially a little tiny telescope-type device mounted alongside the barrel of the telescope proper. It is used to put the object you wish to view -- say, Jupiter or Vega -- in the general area of view of the telescope so that you don?t have to search the sky for minutes on end to find the object you wish to view. Trust me. If you don?t use the viewfinder you?ll get very frustrated.)
The alignment procedure takes about 10 minutes, and unless you remove the viewfinder or bang it against the floor (which you REALLY don?t want to do for reasons which I hope are obvious with a carefully-designed optical instrument), you won?t need to realign it. You?ll also need to ?train the motor drives of the telescope the first time you use it. Training the drives allows the telescope to respond correctly to the buttons pushed on the electronic controller. Again, this is a procedure which requires about 10 minutes of your time, and you should rarely if ever have to do it again.
But, What Can I See?
There?s no one answer to this question, as it depends on your viewing location. If you live in or near a city, be prepared to see just the basics or to take a trip to take a trip far into the suburbs. Light pollution is the astronomer?s greatest foe, and the ETX-90EC, being a relatively powerful scope will only magnify the effects of light pollution. In addition, if you ARE in a city, you?re going to find that the scope imperceptibly ?wiggles? -- causing stars to look as though they?re doing a jig. A general rule of thumb is that the more powerful the scope, the greater the impact of vibrations. Trust me, I occasionally use my scope on my roof deck and the impact of trucks 50 meters away causes the image to shake. So, for best results, head to the hills, or if you are lucky enough to live in a rural or relatively rural area, you should be all set.
Using the ETX-90EC, you?ll see the obvious objects in the sky: the moon, the stars, and the planets. You want to see the rings of Saturn? You?ve got it. How about the moons of Jupiter? You?ve got them also. How about taking a close look at the craters of the moon? Simple. And it looks like it is just across the street. Mars? Yep, it looks pretty red.
Then Start The Additions To the Telescope & Withdrawals From Your Bank Account
But the real wonder of viewing through the ETX-90EC comes when you spend the additional $149 to purchase the Autostar 147 control unit to replace the electronic controller that is supplied with the telescope. The standard controller allows you to control the direction in which the scope is pointed and also allows you to control the speed with which the scope slews (moves) around the sky so that as you are seeking a celestial object you won?t miss it by moving around the sky too quickly.
The Autostar unit, however, is a beautiful Mercedes compared to the Chevrolet that is the standard controller. In addition to the capabilities of the basic unit, the Autostar includes a massive database of celestial objects with which you have the ability to do AMAZING things. Upon starting a viewing session, the Autostar unit takes you through a 5 minutes alignment process by which it determines your exact position on the Earth (yes, really) thereby enabling you to punch into the unit a command telling it to point the telescope at a particular nebula, planet, comet, star, or whatever. It is amazing. You tell it to point at the Big Dipper, it does it. Want to see how Neptune is looking tonight? Push a few buttons, the scope slews around the sky for a few moments, stops, beeps at you to let you know it is done, and you?re looking at Neptune.
In addition, the Autostar unit gives you the option of taking a series of guided tours of the galaxy, with a focus on what is going to be particularly good viewing from your position on the particular night you are viewing.
One of the most fascinating capabilities of the Autostar-equipped ETX-90EC is its ability to find and track satellites and other man-made objects throughout the sky. I have to admit that I have yet to do this, because you have a very short window of opportunity to do this due to the speed with which these objects travel overhead and because when they DO appear where I live it is generally about 2:30 in the morning.
One final note about the Autostar unit is that it is fully updatable for free with information from Meade?s web site (and the purchase, for about $20, of a special connector cable). Just download the update file to your computer, connect the ETX-90EC to your computer,run the self-contained update program, and you?re done. The updates are worth it, because Meade adds impressive new functionalities to the Autostar unit from time to time.
To utilize the telescope in just about any practical manner, you?re going to want to purchase the Meade Deluxe Field Tripod at an amount which I believe was approximately $190. No, you can?t use a standard photographic tripod. It won?t work with this scope, and you probably would want to use it anyway. This tripod enables you to put the telescope into ?polar alignment? mode, one of the two alignment modes possible with this telescope (the other is known as alt-az alignment). I?m not going to get into the technicalities of alignment modes in this review, but I provide this information for those of you who might care. Trust me, if you don?t know what this means, you?re probably not going to care.
Finally, you might want to spend just a bit more money (about $35, I believe) for a Barlow lens, which is essentially a barrel-type device which extends the magnification of the eyepiece used in the ETX-90EC. This will probably be enough magnification for just about any user of this scope. In fact, it may be TOO MUCH magnification in some cases, as it requires the scope to be on extremely steady ground and just about any vibration will make the image you see appear as though it is being impacted by a herd of elephants parading by. Remember, in a telescope, it is not the magnification that is important (as many of the inexpensive and lesser-designed discount telescope designers will lead you to believe), it is the amount of light that is collected by the device (in this case denoted by the 90 mm).
The Downsides
The ETX-90EC is noisy. Yep, when those gears are cranking away slewing the scope around the sky, you can hear it. Does this matter? No. It has no impact on the quality of the scope or its optics, but it is noisy.
It can become downright expensive. The list price of the ETX-90EC is $595, which really is NOT a bad price for a scope of this quality with these capabilities. Until recently, it was next to impossible to get any discount of of this price, but I?ve recently seen some softening of the pricing at some stores, and you might be able to find it for $545 or so. But then add in the field tripod, which you?ll really need, and the Autostar unit, which you REALLY, REALLY, REALLY want, and maybe a Barlow lens, and you?re heading close to $1,000.
The Autostar updates presently are available only to users of Windows-based computers. For Macintosh users, like me, you?re out of luck and need to find a Windows-based friend whom you can bribe with an evening of celestial viewing. Meade has had a notice on their web site for over a year that a Java-based update, which WILL work on the Macintosh, is ?coming soon.? But it has been a long time in coming.
The Conclusion
I love this telescope. It is habit forming. And it has been something of a financial drain. But I?ve been able, finally, to indulge one of my childhood fantasies just about whenever I wish. I have only touched on about half of what I probably should have written about this scope, but you probably don?t want to hear me drone on.
My advice? If you?re in the market for a scope and you have the money, go get it. You won?t be sorry.
