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  • Australian Sky & Telescope

    Meade’s LX85 ACF

    Jan 15, 2020 6 minutes
    by Rod Mollise

    AMONG THE MOST POPULAR telescope mounts today is the medium-capacity, computerised German equatorial mount (GEM). There are several reasons why, including their reasonable cost, good payload capacity, and general versatility — a solid equatorial mount is useful for a wide variety of optical tube assemblies. In the past Meade has produced several GEMs in this range, but the LX85 is the first new one in years, so I was keen to test its performance when paired with Meade’s latest 20-cm Advanced Coma-Free (ACF) Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope.

    The LX85 arrived in two large boxes. One contained the equatorial head, a 5.5-kg counterweight, a tripod with 5-cm diameter steel legs, the AudioStar hand controller, a compass, a CD with Meade’s AutoStar Suite software, and a printed manual. The other box held the 20-cm ACF tube assembly and 8 x 50-mm finderscope, as well as the visual back, a 1¼-inch mirror star diagonal, and 25- and 9.7-mm Plössl eyepieces.

    Assembling the LX85 mount and tripod is a simple task. The telescope connects to the mount with a Vixen-style dovetail bar and is secured

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