Fastest, Easiest Telescope Alignment Yet
Meade introduces what everyone's been waiting for: automatic telescope alignment. Until now, the stargazer's two biggest challenges to enjoying the night sky have been aligning the telescope and finding objects to view. Meade's patented LNT (Level-North-Time) module, with Auto-align and SmartFinder, on this DS2130LNT eliminates both challenges and makes astronomy as easy as pushing a button--right out of the box. Level North Technology levels your telescope, determines North, and precisely enters your current time. There's no time and date to enter, no scrolling through long location lists, no plodding from star to star. All you do is enter your ZIP Code or city and Auto-align locates two fine-tuning stars for you. Conventional three-star alignment requires you to do the work; and if you get any of the steps wrong, your alignment will fail. Auto-align does the work for you. Meade Digital Series telescopes with Auto-align give you the same precision, ease-of-use, and accuracy of telescopes costing hundreds--even thousands--of dollars more. It's the fastest, easiest alignment method yet. No one else has it. No other telescope in the price range can touch it.
SmartFinder--Help For Beginners
Another Meade exclusive, SmartFinder, helps beginners with one of the early frustrating parts of astronomy: centering objects in the finder scope. To a veteran, this is easy; but for beginners, it can be like looking for stars through a drinking straw. Meade's unique red dot finder lets you look at a wide field of the sky with both eyes open. You simply center the red dot on the object you want to see, then move to the telescope's eyepiece for a closer look.
Mirror, Mirror
The optical design of this telescope includes high-resolution primary and secondary mirrors, free of the optical zones and irregularities often found in lower-quality optics. Standard alumimum optical coatings on the lenses increase light transmission through the optical system and increase image contrast, two very important factors in successful celestial viewing. Additionally, integrated on the focuser sleeves of these models is an achromatic relay lens that allows longer focal lengths to fit into a short, compact tube only 5.7" in diameter x 18" long. All Meade Digital Series telescopes resolve to the theoretical limits of their respective apertures, which is a fancy way of saying they grab all the light they can, so you have a better view. The 130 mm (5.1") mirror on this telescope provides images that are more than 265% brighter than what you would see through a 70 mm telescope, allowing you to view fainter, more distant objects in far greater detail. A large and exciting array of objects are visible with this telescope including: Saturn's rings (with enough detail to view the Cassini division in the rings); Saturn's largest moon (Titan); Jupiter's four largest moons; Jupiter's cloud belts; and craters, mountain ranges, and fault lines on our own Moon. You can also observe the Moonlike phases of the planet Venus and hundreds of deep-space phenomena like galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters. This telescope provides stellar performance without the astronomic price you might expect. If you're serious about star gazing--but want to keep your budget down to earth--this telescope is certainly worth exploring.
AutoStar Computer Control
One of the most important advances in telescope design in the past 25 years is the AutoStar Computer Controller (Meade #494) that now includes a high-precision internal time chip and compass/bubble level, and provides location and tracking features previously available only on much more expensive telescopes. You'll be able to locate and view more celestial objects in one night than Galileo saw in his lifetime. Don't know what to look at on a particular night? Not to worry. Just select Tonight's Best and AutoStar will automatically take you on a guided tour of planets, stars, nebulae, and other objects out on that night. Want to know more about what you're looking at? AutoStar's LCD display will teach you about the object with details like distance, temperature, mass, and historical information. AutoStar's star catalogs list innumerable double and multiple star systems, variable stars, open star clusters, globular clusters, diffuse nebulosities, planetary nebulae, and spiral galaxies within grasp of the instrument. The AutoStar controller can locate all of these objects automatically, in seconds. Just plug the AutoStar into the telescope's HBX port, and you're ready to observe any object in the AutoStar's 1,400-object database. If you want to view an object that doesn't happen to be in the AutoStar's massive database, all you need are the object's celestial coordinates and AutoStar will find it for you. Let AutoStar be your guide to the universe.
Redesigned Tracking Mechanism
Completely reengineered and redesigned, the Meade DS telescopes provide smoother motions in altitude and azimuth than ever before. Even when operated manually, without the electronic control, this telescope offers a mechanical precision and low-backlash motion for quick object location and tracking. Oversize bearings on both telescope axes provide much greater precision than that of competing models. Because the Earth rotates, objects in the sky will move out of your telescope's field of view within a few seconds. To continue viewing the object, you need to follow, or track, the object to compensate for the Earth's motion. The AutoStar computer controller included with this telescope takes all the work out of tracking by allowing you to select an appropriate tracking speed with the push of a button. If you just want to scan the skies, use the AutoStar's pushbuttons to move the telescope on either or both axes simultaneously (with nine available slew speeds, from 2x sidereal to 5 degrees-per-second) or, an AutoStar Guided Tour will automatically take you to the best objects to view on any given night.
Included With Purchase:
Meade Instructional DVD, AutoStar Suite Astronomer Edition Software For PC (Windows Only), and field tripod.
