M2 (Globular Cluster), quite an impressive sight as it is so densely packed.

M31 (Andromeda Galaxy), very large and easy to find but very little detail, M110 visible beside it.

Jupiter, always has several moons visible in a flat plane with the planet, can see banding in good conditions.

The Moon, pretty hard to miss! Best seen at around half moon for most definition (shadowing of craters etc).List of objects I have seen through my scope, in order of discovery: (122 Objects, Last updated: ) Compass, mini spirit level, red filtered torches etc.Astro-Engineering camera piggy back mount.Nikon D3200 DSLR with 18-52mm and 70-300mm, Seagul right angle 2x viewfinder, IR remote.Meade QX 20mm, Meade 26mm/18mm/5mm Plossl eyepieces, 2x Barlow.

Meade #497 Autostar hand controller and software.

Meade ETX-105 EC (105mm, f14, 1470mm focal length Maksutov-Cassegrain).

I’m not using the 2x Barlow so much now since getting that eye-piece.

Put simply this has a much wider glass lens to look through which is far more comfortable on the eye, some of the cheaper Meade plossl’s are like looking through a keyhole. I have the Meade QX4000 20mm as my main eyepiece, this was well worth the money as it has a much larger apparent field of view (70deg) while also magnifying slightly more than my 26mm. It also came with the Meade LPI ccd imager (Lunar & Planetary Imager, basically a Meade USB webcam) and Autostar Suite software for computer based remote control but I haven’t explored this much yet. Once aligned properly this gives the scope ‘goto’ functionality so you can pick an object from the on screen database, press ‘goto’, and the scope automatically moves to that object in the sky. The scope came with the Autostar hand controller for all the scope settings and slewing (moving) the scope around. This applies to either wide field views of the heavens with a normal camera mounted piggy back on the scope or through the scope itself for tracking planets or deep sky objects. So where normally I would shoot star trails from a static camera with tracking the stars stay still allowing light to be gathered for long periods of time. The telescope has alt-az and polar tracking modes which basically means it can compensate for the rotation of the earth and therefore appear to make the stars stand still. This came up in an advert in the local paper so I did a lot of Googling and ended up buying it! Meade ETX scopes are very common and people have captured some very impressive results with them though various imaging techniques.

Meade envisage 7 manual