Meade 10-inch LX200GPS-SMT telescope

When optical and mechanical excellence are paramount, Meade's 10-inch LX200GPS-SMT sets a high standard.
By | Published: May 19, 2009 | Last updated on May 18, 2023
Meade 10-inch LX200GPS-SMT telescope
The LX200GPS-SMT telescope by Meade Instruments Corp. is a complete, high-quality system.
Astronomy: James Forbes

This review, “Star power,” appeared in the July 2004 issue of Astronomy magazine.

Meade’s 10-inch LX200GPS-SMT with Autostar Suite hurried along something that’s been a long time coming in my life: I’ve finally become a cyberastronomer. The Autostar Suite of software and hardware is so easy to use that I was driving the telescope with a cranky old computer and taking images with Meade’s Lunar Planetary Imager (LPI) camera on the first night I tried it.

That’s not to say I didn’t do some daytime experimenting first (as Meade recommends) and that I didn’t have problems (sometimes computers just don’t behave quite the way they are expected to by instruction-manual writers). But I managed to get it all working with minimal frustration. Watch out, sky. Here I come!

Meade Instruments’s LX200GPS-SMT telescope line builds on their earlier LX200 and LX200GPS models. Besides upgrading the mounts and hand control, the package now includes the Autostar Suite with a CCD camera for lunar and planetary imaging. You can do so much with this system. It’s hard to know where to begin, so I thought I’d start from the ground up.

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