LX-90 update -frustration and success

Hey Meade - if you're going to help this little old lady across the universe, tell her first!

Ok, got that out of my system!

See, as mentioned earlier, when my LX90 came back from Meade with its mechanical guts repaired, it also arrived with what certainly looked like a brand new computer hand controller - but no mention in the paper work of this, and no instructions relating to it. Result - about an hour and half of prime observing time spent playing with a telescope doing what should have taken me 10 minutes if Meade had only included a simple, one page instruction sheet. (Yes I went to the Meade Web site and no, I was not able to find these instructions, though they must be there somewhere. ) Anyway, such a sheet was tvery kindly sent to me this morning by G.N. Huftalen, Jr., owner and director of Metacom Observatory in neighboring Warren, RI . (Thanks George. The Metacom web site is here.)

The instructions are clear and helpful - they are an update that came out in October of 2005, about 9 months after I bought my scope. No - I don't update my scope's firmaware regularly, partly because I'm lazy and really resent any astronomy time I have to devote to caring for technology, but partly because with computers I generally feel "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." My LX90 performed marvelously on the software that came with it until i did something stupid and burned out one of the motors.

So while it was nice for Meade to provide a new controller with new software, a little note saying they had done that - and the page of instructions George sent me today - would have saved me a lot of frustration and wasted observing time last night. See, when you turn the scope on now the routine is immiately and significantly different than it was.

Like Celestron, Meade now - ok, as of the fall of 2005 - provides an auto-align feature for those who don't know the names of even a handful of stars. (We see 15 first magnitude stars from our location - is it really asking too much for people to learn their names?) Ok - now I';m sounding like an old fogey. I really do like "go to" scopes and I find them useful both for instruction and personal observing. But I do like to pick my own alignment stars because when the computer does that task, it frequently picks one - such as Sirius - that is down below my tree line. I routinely use four different automatic systems -ones from Meade, Orion, Celestron, and Argo Navis and of the four, I feel Meade does the worst job with its documentation - but the system performs beautifully. I say this just so you understand that I am not computer phobic.

So last night when it was obvious I was dealing with a fresh deck, I had enough common sense to fill in time, date, position and telescope model - but when I tried the new auto-align feature where they don't tell you the name of the star they have chosen, there was no bright star in my finder and it would have been a wild guess as to which bright star the computer's little silicon brain thought it had chosen.

So rather than read it's mind I started all over just doing a two-star alignment. That failed repeatedly. The initial instruction with that is to put the telescope in "home" position but it doesn't define a home position for the LX90 and my instruction manual is quite specific when it says there "is no home position" for the LX90! So silicon genius displays "put in home position" and the dead-tree manual is telling me there is no such thing. Who to believe?

I didn't know and the moon was getting lower in the sky, so I tried this other short-cut in the manual where it says point to a star and choose "target, astronomical" and hit enter and it will start tracking. Uh huh. I wish that was so. The ""I choose was the 4-day moon - which I had been carefully planning all day to observe - and I hit enter and nothing - no tracking. (Yes, I know tracking the moon is a bit different than tracking a star, but it should have done a usable approximation.) As the moon slid out of view, I tried again and again - nothing. Ok. So just slow down the slewing speed and use the arrow keys to keep the moon in view. And that's what I did for the next hour. Not horrible - but not why I bought an automatic telescope either.

At 4 am - after several hours sleep - I was in a better mood and to my surprise, the skies were still clear. I tried the auto procedure again - nothing. So I decided the non-existant home position must be level and pointing north - did that, went to two-star alignment, picked the stars I wanted (Vega and Arcturus) and it worked like a charm. Bingo - I quickly went from M3 to M51 to M57 to Cor Caroli, and then to Epsilon Lyra, the Double Double. All were easily found within the field of view of a 12mm Plossl. That's good enough for me. The collimation was spot on, too. Double-double split cleanly - and the skies were much steadier than eight hours earlier, Only troube was, I wasn't really observing - just testing the scope. And by the time I was ready to observe the sky was already significantly light in the east and the clouds were rolling in from the west.

But I was in a better mood. Still - my advice to Meade is the same as my advice to Boy Scouts - before you go helping some little old lady across the street, make sure she isn't just as happy to be on this side. ;-)

Oh - btw - I'm becoming an aficionado of simple, cheap eyepieces. My bets view of the Double Double came with a 6mm Celestron Plossl - one of their cheap ones - and before that, sort out of ornerisness, I was using a Meade 25mm MA - a glorified Kellner, I beleieve - and popping it into a 2X barlow. So far, I'm not missing my Naglers and Televue Plossls a bit. Of course, maybe I'm just a lousy observer and don't appreciate what i'm failing to see.