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It all comes packaged in a very nice quality backpack along with a fold-up tripod so you can pack it away, toss it in the car for travel, take it on a hike or hang it on the wall for storage. This makes it even easier to travel with as you don’t have to bring the tripod. Take it off the tripod and put it on a table and you have a fully functional computerized robotic system. With the ETX 80 Observer the brains are in the base of the scope and the handset. Previous versions made it very difficult to remove the optical tube if you wanted to put it on a different mount.Īnother great advantage of this design is that you can use the Meade ETX 80 Observer on the included tripod or as a tabletop scope. Many computerized scopes do not allow you to do this, but the ETX 80 Observer makes it easy.Īnother interesting enhancement is that the optical tube can be easily removed from the mount with two screws.
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If you want to use the scope manually, which I do from time to time, you can unlock the clutches and point the scope yourself.
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Many other computerized scopes would be dead, unusable, but not the ETX-80 Observer. Some other computerized scopes require an external pack which can be inconvenient to use, or which can be forgotten at home.Ī great feature of the Meade ETX Observer line is that you can use these telescopes manually. Six AA batteries go inside the base of the scope so there are no external battery packs or power supply needed. Depending on your knowledge of astronomy, you might find this feature either extremely helpful or extremely annoying. When it slews to new targets, it will start talking about some basic facts about the object. The AudioStar controller is essentially a glorified pocket calculator that has speakers on it. The ETX-80 Observer is a GoTo telescope running off Meade’s latest and greatest hand controller and software, the AudioStar. You are likely to want to use this at all times – not only to prevent condensation on the lens, but also to keep stray light and glare out to increase the contrast in your views at the eyepiece. Lastly, the ETX-80 includes a thread-on plastic dew shield for the objective lens. You can look through the eyepiece and then flip the mirror and have the light go to the camera.
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Purchase the appropriate adapter for your brand of DSLR camera and you can mount your camera to the back of the scope. The integrated star diagonal also has a threaded port on the back, not something you will see on other telescopes in this class. The ETX-80’s short focal length means that sighting along the tube will work in a pinch if the finder’s battery dies – 15x is the magnification of some finderscopes and binoculars anyways. Once you have the scope aligned you can turn this off as the scope will find the targets for you. This is a good match to the ETX 80 Observer as this is typically only needed during set-up. The ETX-80’s fast achromatic optics mean it really can’t handle much over 80x, and while you could go lower than 15x with something like a 32mm Plossl we wouldn’t really advise it due to the brightened background and the negligible difference in the field of view.Ī red dot finder is included. These are good magnifications for general use of the scope. The included 9.7 mm Plossl eyepiece gives you 41X. The ETX-80’s included 26 mm Plossl eyepiece gives you 15X. The main difference is that the ETX-80 Observer features a built-in flip mirror diagonal instead of a detachable 1.25” star diagonal like most refractors do, and it focuses by moving the objective lens back and forth rather than the eyepiece holder, in an attempt to keep the telescope as compact and user-friendly as possible. The ETX-80 Observer is an 80mm f/5 achromatic refractor with a 400mm focal length, almost identical to the Orion ShortTube 80 and Meade Infinity 80.