The Meade 6” ETX-LS ACF Lightswitch telescope
A brief review
Editors note: this review was first published on Robert Dalby’s personal website (www.robertjdalby.com) and we are grateful for his permission to publish it here. As Robert is clear to note in his text – this review should be considered biased as he owns a business that sells these telescopes.
Whilst Meade’s fortunes may appear to have declined a little in recent years, the company is now on top of their financial difficulties, and the new Lightswitch technology ETX-LS is the first sign of them roaring back to full strength.
The Meade 6″ ETX-LS Lightswitch robotic telescopeMeade telescopes have been one of the worlds biggest selling and most successful brands and are especially favoured among users who take the hobby of astronomy seriously. I remember the introduction of the Meade LX200 seventeen years ago (now affectionately called the LX200 Classic). People like me who discovered astronomy in the 1970s were bewildered by the almost magical capabilities of this new instrument – it had so many fantastic features you had little choice but to go out and buy one! Steadily, and sometimes grudgingly, almost everyone with a serious interest in astronomy did just that.
A point about objectivity: this review has absolutely none. I’m closely involved with the sale of these and other Meade telescopes by businesses that I either own or am financially involved with – anything that I say can only be regarded as wholly biased (wouldn’t it be great if UK government ministers could adopt this standard of honesty!). The only observation I can offer in mitigation is that I don’t normally do “telescope reviews” either when asked or for the promotion of my business interests. And I’ve only done this one in a sense of fun because for my own personal purposes I took one of these telescopes home one night to try it out. So here, more or less, is what happened.
First impressions
The telescope was well packaged in a stout inner and outer box, and safely cocooned between two shells of die-cut foam.
The assembled telescope is in two parts – three if you count the removable handset but I recommend leaving this attached and plugged in at all times – the main telescope tube and drive base assembly and the tripod. The drive base and tube assembly has a handle cast into the very top of the fork arm – this makes the telescope easy to carry one-handed.
The build quality of the Lightswitch impresses immediately. The whole telescope construction feels solid – nothing moves, wobbles or creaks as you handle it. Much of the construction is cast aluminium – what plastics there are feel solid and dense to the touch. The aluminium casting that secures the main tube to the altitude shaft is an inspired piece of design – and functions as well as it looks. The red dot finder is of a type not seen on other Meade models and is robustly fitted. To anyone who admires Meade older products there are some little reminders of the past.
The build quality of the ETX-LS impresses immediately. The whole telescope construction feels solid – nothing moves, wobbles or creaks as you handle it.
The solid aluminium focus knob looks identical to the one used on the LX200 Classic – actually it’s whisker smaller (I know because I measured it and compared it with the specs of the original – I’m a sad little man, I know). The design of the front corrector cell and the eyepiece holder also suggest a link with the LX200. Unique features of the Lightswitch so far seen on no other Meade product include USB in and output ports, an RCA video output socket, audio output socket and a miniSD memory card slot as well as a moisture-proof loudspeaker.
Anything to worry about?
After clearing the boxes, my first concern was to find no book of instructions. Instead, a large glossy fold-out card with nice diagrams and hardly any text declared itself to be a ‘Quick Set-up Guide’. I should have been reassured by this simplification as this is just the kind of minimal guidance you get with today’s best plug-an-play computers and mobile phones. But my experience with Meade products made me cautious. Meade are known in the trade, and by experienced users, for great products accompanied by less than adequate instruction manuals. Finding no manual at all and just a disc and a quick start guide set my “Uh-oh” instinct in play.
It’s fair to say that I brought a few preconceptions to my test of this new Meade telescope – and not all of them positive. I’m very familiar with Meade telescopes and have, as part of my commercial life as a telescope accessory designer, made something of a study of their foibles.
At the back of my mind too is the fact that although Meade as a company has hit the highs of design and innovation excellence, with products like the LX200, LX90 and the previous ETX telescopes, not long after these triumphs they squandered their hard won reputation pushing poor products like the early Pictor CCD cameras and the ill conceived LXD55. Design genius, it seems, is often uneven in its workings.
I’ll also admit to being something of a practising Luddite, especially when it comes to electronic technology, and rarely change equipment just to keep up-to-date and, if proof was needed, I still own two Meade LX200 Classic telescopes the newest of which is at least twelve years old. I had started to wonder whether this fully automated self-aligning telescope might just be another step too far.
Not the ideal set of attitudes to bring to a review of the world’s most sophisticated electronic telescope you may think!
Setting up the ETX Lightswitch
A scan through the quick start guide took me a minute and I set the telescope up as directed. I extended the tripod to full height and positioned it in front garden without any orientation or special levelling and only about 30 feet from the front of the house.
I had to scout about for some local shade as there is a street light not far away. It was dark and although the first quarter Moon was visible it was quite low in the sky and quite unobtrusive. I plonked the telescope on the tripod and found that there is a neat system to allow the base to click into exactly the right position so that the holes in the telescope base line up perfectly with the three hand-screws that secure the telescope to the tripod. This has been very well designed and needs no explanation or guidance in use.
The ON and OFF switch.The telescope has a robust looking integral battery drawer that takes 8x C type dry cells. I elected to use a separate 12V power supply. I used a Black & Decker 4Ah battery pack and a Astro Engineering AC367 power lead to make the connection (a little product placement there – the only one in this review, honest!). Because of the name Lightswitch and the ‘you-only-have-to-switch-it-on’ marketing concept, the marketeer/design team at Meade have made a bit of a fuss of the on and off switch. It’s big and illuminated with a red LED and protected from accidental contact by raised shoulders. I like it. It’s the kind of moment of genious Kurt Vonnegut would have approved of (anyone who has read the Sirens of Titan will remember the automated flying saucers on Mars that only had one control – an on and off switch). I was already starting to get a warm cuddly feeling for this telescope.
I installed the star diagonal in the eyepiece holder and inserted the included 26mm 4000 Series eyepiece. I then uncapped the main telescope and also removed the cap from the integrated Eclips camera and, without a drum roll, switched the telescope on.
This is the Captain speaking…
Within seconds a calm professional voice was telling me what an all round good idea it was to have bought this telescope or some such. For the record the sound quality is rather good, not at all tinny or harsh, in fact the voice (male) has a nice soft bass tone that can be adjusted to a intimate whisper simply by lowering the volume, by dabbing the down arrow on the handset, so that only the telescope user can hear it. The handset gives you the option of switching the AV announcements off very easily by pressing a single button labelled Media – but I elected to leave this option switched on to see how well it worked.
After a brief self-check involving the telescope tube moving around briefly, the voice announced (along with the handset display) that the telescope was checking GPS satellites for time and location information – it also asked me to remove the dust cap from the Eclips camera. The handset display began to show the GPS search routine was in operation.
In the past GPS systems on telescopes can be troublesome if the telescope is placed such that the GPS module antenna is in radio shadow and not getting a good view of the whole sky. After about ten minutes of the GPS scan routine I decided that the telescope’s position could be improved greatly if I moved it further away from the house to give the GPS system a better chance at collecting enough satellite data to get a good fix. To do this I simply switched the telescope off before waiting for it to finish the search and picked up the whole shebang (with tripod the 6” Lightswitch weighs a little over 40 or so pounds) and moved it another twenty foot from the house. I switched the telescope back on and within a minute it had settled into the GPS scan routine again.
This time, after about a minute of scanning, the voice announced that the telescope was finding level and north. The telescope whirred sweetly and went through a series of preset moves to check the mount tip and tilt. There is no mechanical adjustment as such in the so-called self-levelling procedure – the telescope just measures the levelling error in the tripod and then uses this information to form a datum of the correction necessary when the telescope is tracking or making a GOTO move. Next the telescope finds north using its inbuilt electronic compass – and I noted that the main tube’s last position correlated pretty well with north as indicated by the direction of Polaris the north star. The electronic compass can be calibrated to reduce the error between magnetic and true north – but I put this off to another night, hoping that the magnetic bearing would be good enough.
Self-alignment
The announcer then confirmed that the telescope would now attempt self-guided star alignment .
The telescope moves and the voice announces that the telescope is now imaging the first alignment star.
This process is carried out in silence but the handset displays the sequence of what the telescope is doing from moment to moment – and I must say I found it entertaining in a geeky sort of way. It takes three images one after the other and calibrates them and moves to processing. The voice announces that the telescope is trying to centre the alignment star Vega. Being careful not to touch the telescope, I peeped into the eyepiece as the telescope was moving and saw the bright blue star Vega swing in to the field of view of the 26mm eyepiece. The imaging procedure was repeated and another small move placed Vega bang in the centre of the eyepiece view.
The voice announced that the telescope was now moving to find the second alignment star. After the move the imaging sequence began. After two attempts the telescope announced that it had failed to locate the second star (I could see that it was hidden by a small patch of cloud) and would try a broad search. The telescope moved eastwards about 10 degrees and repeated the imaging sequence. When this failed the telescope moved about 20 degrees west and tried the imaging sequence again – when this was finished, the telescope announced that it had failed to find the second alignment star and was selecting a third option – this time Mizar in Ursa Major.
After just two imaging and centering episodes Mizar moved smoothly to the centre of the eyepiece field. The telescope is successfully aligned said the voice. In all, counting from the moment I put the tripod up, the alignment took about thirteen minutes – excluding the initial false start of course - enough time to get your coat on and select a few eyepieces (in fact the next night I used the scope it took less than ten minutes to reach this same point).
I was very impressed at the straightforward way the telescope had got on with the job without any input from me at all – especially when the search for the second alignment star failed. This suggested to me that the technology was solid and reliable and that it was tolerant enough to cope with the real world difficulties of stars hidden behind trees and buildings etc. From switching on the ETX LS the whole alignment procedure was 100% automatic – had I chosen not to watch the telescope work and simply set it on its tripod and switched it on the result would have been the same – a remarkable and impressive feat of technology.
Astronomy with the ETX Lightswitch
The telescope was now tracking Mizar (the last alignment star) and as the Moon was too low for useful observation and the house was blocking the view of Jupiter – the only planet on view – I decided to try the telescope out on a few deep-sky targets. I pressed the button on the handset for the Messier target list and selected M57. The Lightswitch swung quickly to the target and as it slowed I moved to the eyepiece in time to see the tiny grey smoke ring of the Ring nebula swing into view. I tried a few different eyepieces and was impressed with the nice tight stars produced by the 6” ACF optical system.
Next up, the nearby Dumbbell, M27 another planetary nebula – perfectly centred and a good view in a 15mm eyepiece showing a dappled hourglass shape (I guess I need to spend a lot more time in the gym and less in the kitchen if I’m ever to see M27 as a dumbbell!). To test the pointing accuracy with a larger move I selected M81 – and it swung nicely in to the centre of the 26mm eyepiece. Every target was accompanied with a voiceover delivering details of the target in terms of, type, distance etc. I didn’t connect a screen to the video output and I can imagine this being less than useful when observing deep-sky targets that need dark-adapted vision. First a tiny hop to M82 and then a long slew to the giant M31 Andromeda spiral showing a prominent dark dust lane in the 26mm eyepiece, Followed by another short hop to the nearby galaxy NGC891. I found this edge on galaxy hard to see as the sky was not totally dark and there was quite a bit of nearby light around the telescope. I observed for another hour viewing about twenty targets each one appearing almost perfectly centred in the 26mm eyepiece.
I didn’t have the time to test the on board camera (other than during self-alignment) and I didn’t use any of the other special features, like the ability to connect a Meade DS camera or view any of the multi-media content on a screen via the video output socket. I was content just to use this telescope for its basic purpose of viewing the night sky – and I was very impressed with the quality of the views. But the real crowd-pleaser is the convenience and precision of the self-alignment system. Other than a few curmudgeons who don’t really like anything new on principle – I can’t easily see how there can be anyone – newbie or veteran astronomer – who won’t like this telescope for this ability. The ETX-LS Lightswitch discharges, completely automatically, those essential telescope set-up chores at the beginning of an observing session that normally take effort and time to do.
Observing our nearest star using the ETX-LS and an AE SolVu safe solar filter at the Astronomy and Nature CentreThe inveterate grumblers out there are going say that this is not a telescope for experts. They don’t need the soothing “American Airlines” captains voice telling them what the telescope is doing and why and what it’s going to do next. The expert doesn’t need the voiceover giving vital facts and figures about each object the telescope moves to. And, of course, the expert doesn’t need all this clever help setting up the telescope, finding alignment stars, setting the date and time etc. Well, I’ve been an amateur astronomer since I was 14, and I liked all these features and I can easily imagine folk with much less experience liking these even more than I did.
The folk who think you must suffer for your astronomy, that somehow it’s not ‘real astronomy’ unless your fingers and nose have gone black and brittle with the cold, and unless you’ve spent 30 minutes fumbling about in the dark setting up the telescope, fiddling with compasses, spirit levels and polar alignment scopes – are not going to like this telescope. If you really enjoy spending all night to see five objects and honestly enjoy the challenge of finding targets rather than actually viewing them, then the Meade Lightswitch is not the telescope for you. But if you want to view 50 of the best targets in the night sky in two hours, one after another, and learn something about them along the way, with next to no effort from yourself then this stunning telescope might be the one for you.
By way of balance I need to find something I don’t like about this instrument. It’s not easy – I like almost everything about it. I think the tripod is the one area where the critical eye can see signs of economy of manufacture. The tripod is actually quite good and does the job of holding the telescope “good enough for government work” – as we like to say in the Astro Engineering machine shop. There was some extended wobble at the telescope eyepiece that a heavier gauge tripod would have seen off. So the tripod could be better – a more substantial head casting with fewer tendencies to buckle and heavier gauge legs would be good but you can’t have everything. And besides, it gives Astro Engineering something to do – we have a small range of special ETX-LS Lightswitch accessories planned for launch spring 2010 (when we think the telescope will be around in commercially significant numbers as regards accessory sales).
Concluding remarks
As a very good astronomy telescope the ETX-LS Lightswitch gets full marks – ten out of ten, no question. As an example of a state-of-the-art multi-discipline modern design – that offers a performance close to magic – it is without doubt the most sophisticated GOTO telescope on the market. There is quite simply nothing to touch it.
We celebrate 400 years of the telescope in 2009 and Hans Lippershey has the distinction of inventing the first telescope and Galileo that of being the first person to use a telescope systematically on the night sky. But there is no doubt, that currently the distinction for creating the most sophisticated and easy to use astronomy telescope goes to the designers and engineers at Meade Instruments for their beautifully conceived and executed ETX-LS.
© Robert J Dalby 2009
