Meade Telescope Parts Examined

Starting out as tiny home-based business in the early seventies, Meade telescopes have grown into a huge telescope supplies outfit.  It began as a mail-order dealer of small telescopes on top of am kitchen table in small apartment and eventually Meade discovered that there was a massive need for good telescope parts and accessories which are not being delivered. Meade immediately added specific quality telescope parts to their list which included precision pinions and racks, adapters, filters, viewfinders, focusers, and orthoscopic eyepieces.

By 1986, no other telescope-manufacturing company is as huge as Meade Instruments, in fact, by 1995, Meade sold more telescopes than all the other telescopes the competition sold combined. To date, it still is the world’s biggest maker and supplier of serious telescopes. However, it got entangled in a legal battle over patent infringement issues with its former business foe Celestron when it started marketing Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes, a type of telescope the selling of which has been towered over by Celestron for the longest time.

Meade in 2008 made certain modifications in their Schmidt-Cassegrain line up and had it patented as “Advanced Coma-Free optics” or ACF optics. This technology offers better viewing since a hyperbolic secondary mirror, replacing the original Schmidt-Cassegrain spherical secondary mirror. Meade’s manufacturing plant is headquartered in Irvine, California, but because of increased demands on telescope and telescope accessories, it has recently expanded and has set up another manufacturing plant in Tijuana, Mexico.

Over the years, aside from telescopes, Meade has also manufactured telescope parts and accessories which include:

1. mySKY and mySKY Plus (global positioning system used as a guide)
2. Lunar and Deep Sky digital imagers
3. Radian 60-degree eyepieces
4. Panoptic 68-degree eyepieces
5. Series5000 eyepieces
6. 5-inch and 6-inch achromatic refractors

Meade is also marketing the following serious types of telescopes:

• Solar telescopes – Meade bought a former competitor, Coronado Filters, and they have been marketing telescopes that people can use to see the sun. Before, the wavelength to be able to view the sun is Calcium K but recently it has been discovered that it is better to utilize Hydrogen-Alpha wavelengths. The model being sold by Meade for this purpose is name Solarmax 40
• GoTo telescopes – these telescopes include the following models:

1. DS-2000 Series
2. ETX-LS
3. LXD75

These models are tagged as GoTo because they are all equipped with computerized alt-azimuth and equatorial self-aiming mounts

• Maksutov telescopes – 90mm to 125mm telescopes
• Newtonian telescopes – includes the 6 to 10 inches Schmidt-Newtonian and the 8, 10, 12 to 16 inches Lightbridge Dobsonian telescopes
• ACF telescopes (Advanced Coma-Free) – includes the models LX200-ACF with ACF Optics  and the LX90_ACF

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