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Meade Star Chart Guide - Aug 24, 2007

Here in the Midwest we've had nothing but severe storms and tons of rain filling rivers way over their banks. Many of our cities have been declared disaster areas. It's a disaster also for stargazers because their telescopes have been useless for quite a while now. This is a good time to open the Meade Star Chart Guide. Even experienced gazers and geezers might get some new information from this book. Includes a basic star map/star chart (The Glow-in-the-Dark Star Finder) that glows in the dark and can be rotated to find exact location of constellation at specific year and month. So buy one today for cloudy nights when your telescope is of no use.

posted by Steve L @ 4:31 PM  0 Comments Links to this post  

Computers and telescopes - Aug 21, 2007

A frequent request that comes my way is for a device that allows an observer to see real time images from a telescope on their computer. The good news, though not perfect news, is that there are some options. The best way to see real time images form a telescope on your computer is to mount a high resolution surveillance camera (we don't carry) over the eyepiece of the telescope and use it to feed images to a computer via an RCA cable or USB cable. This, however, is expensive and the camera, alone, can cost as much or more than the telescope. Not really a practical option for most beginners. If you are on a budget, an electronic eyepiece is an inexpensive option, but an electronic eyepiece can only produce low resolution, black and white images which will never equal the quality of what you see with a standard eyepiece in your telescope. They are fun and easy to use, however, and can be used in any telescope which uses 1.25" eyepieces. The most popular electronic eyepiece on the market is the Meade 902.

posted by Joanie K @ 6:05 AM  0 Comments Links to this post  

Connect a Meade telescope to a computer - Aug 20, 2007

One of the questions customers frequently ask about their Meade telescope is if there is a way to connect their 494 Autostar equipped (DS series or ETX-80) telescope to a computer. The answer is , yes, this is easily done with the Meade 506 Astrofinder kit, which supplies a star map for downloading to a computer and the necessary cables. Just pull up the map on your laptop, click a mouse on the object you wish to see and the motors in the telescope mount move the telescope to the correct position in the sky. In other words, it's a fun and convenient way to bypass the standard hand control supplied with your Meade telescope. Note that this does not provide images - you need to still look through the telescope for that. Also, if your laptop does not have a serial port (most only have a USB port these days), you will also need the RS-232 bridge cable.

posted by Joanie K @ 7:45 AM  0 Comments Links to this post  

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