Ed Looks at a Vintage (ca. 2003) Meade LXD55 8" Schmidt-Newtonian! How Does it Perform?

Postscript: Shortly after filming this video, the LXD55 mount developed additional mechanical and electronic issues. We made the decision not to put more time into it. Note that all electronic mounts (not just the LXD55) tend to become trouble prone as they age.

Since the LXD55 was out of commission for the length of this review, all tests were conducted with the optical tube on a Celestron AVX mount.

The Moonlite focuser is here: https://focuser.com/products.php

An excellent article on how to collimate a Schmidt-Newtonian is here: http://www.weasner.com/lxd/techtips/kennett/Collimating_a_Schmidt_Newtonian.pdf

The telescope came with an eyepiece extension tube, but I didn’t need it for either visual or photographic use.

Jupiter and Saturn images:
ZWOASI120MC planetary imager, best 80% of 1000 frames stacked in Autostakkert, with wavelets processed in Registax 6. Image capture done in SharpCap.

Deep sky images:
Modded Canon T3i, Astronomik CLS light pollution filter, generic intervalometer
SBIG STi-c autoguider, guided through PHD2
Celestron AVX mount
Frames: 21 to 39 subframes (varies by object) at 25 seconds each, ISO 800, stacked with 10 darks taken on site at the end of the evening
Processing done in PixInsight, final touchup work done in Photoshop 2020

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Видео Ed Looks at a Vintage (ca. 2003) Meade LXD55 8" Schmidt-Newtonian! How Does it Perform? канала Ed Ting