Meade Electronic Eyepiece | great addition to any telescope

Meade Electronic Eyepiece | Excellent product with alot of potential

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Meade Electronic E...

	Meade Electronic Eyepiece Meade Meade average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This electronic eyepiece lets you display live real-time images of the Moon, planets, stars, and terrestrial objects on your TV screen so that several people can enjoy your scope at the same time . . .

great addition to any telescope

This eyepiece is quite nice. I tried it out and was amazed at the results. I use it on a six inch reflecting telescope. I used it first on the best target in the night sky, the Moon. It looked as though I was looking through a window on an apollo capsule orbiting the moon. I am not kidding. It was great. I then moved over to Saturn. I could clearly see the rings and bands of clouds. This item is worth the cost!

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Excellent product with alot of potential

I bought this product on sale for $39.00 at a local camera store after reading the reviews on this page. This was after I also bought an Orion Electronic eyepiece the week before. One thing that makes this eyepiece infinetly better than the Orion eyepiece is the fact that it is threaded for filters (or stacking of multiple filters) whereas the Orion eyepiece is not. Using it on my 6" reflector, I first tried it with a white light solar filter. The view was crisp as I expected on both the Meade and the Orion eyepiece. The Meade eyepiece is alittle larger than the Orion eyepiece (4mm vs. Orion's 3.8mm) but it is not really too noticeable. Viewing the moon at gibbous phase and the contrast tweaked, the view was also crisp and defined in both eyepieces. I finally tried it on Jupiter. Here is where the difference between the Orion eyepiece and the Meade eyepiece was most pronounced. Because the Orion eyepiece is not threaded, Jupiter came out completely whitewashed, even when the contrast was completely tweaked. Because the Meade eyepiece is able to be used with a filter, I placed a Baader's Planetary Contrast Booster on it. The 2 cloud belts at the equator were visible on my 20" TV as a monitor. Also visible were the 4 moons at the same setting. When used with a video card tied in to a pc, a person can frame-grab and have their own "poor man's" version of a CCD picture. Using this method, suprisingly good pictures that rival much higher priced CCD's may be achieved. This eyepiece in my opinion is well worth the price (even if you don't get it on sale) and has alot of potential when used with a video card. Just remeber to buy some extension cords and adapters for the RCA cables.

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It was worth the price, but don't expect ccd performance

Having read the reviews of others prior to purchasing my electronic eyepiece, I did not expect too much from it. But for the price I paid, I would buy it again. My main dislike is the apparent focal length. It is the equivalent of about a 4mm lens. I live in a major metropolitan area with lots of haze and light pollution, a 4mm optical lens is of questionable value. The electronics makes it worst. I can see earth's moon pretty well, but only the brightest two of Jupiter's four visible moons. Forget about seeing dim stars or deep space objects.

I am relatively new to astronomy. I have two point and look refractors, a 350mm and a 700mm. I tried the Meade Electronic Eyepiece in both. The 700mm results in too much magnification. The eyepiece works better with the 350mm, but images go completely across the TV screen in about 40 seconds, resulting in a slight smearing as they move.

A control to increase the focal length would have made this eyepiece more usable. It also needs to be used on a telescope that tracks. I have now ordered such a telescope, which is costing me far more than the electronic eyepiece did in the first place.

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Almost perfect device

I used this Electronic Eyepiece to make some movies of the Mercury Transit in 2006, and it did that very well with my Coronado PST and Konusmotor 500/Thousand Oaks White Light filter. However, I had to hook this up to my VCR to make the movie using a twenty foot long coaxial cable with RCA adapters. I had really planned on connecting it to my Sony Camcorder so I could have a lot of mobility, but the Camcorder and eyepiece simply cannot work together. It does work well with my VCRs and televisions, though.

Exploration is fun....

But not when it comes to locating information omitted from an instruction manual. The expected image I saw of the moon through my 9mm lens initiated the search. I should have came here first, because it would have saved me a lot of time - as would Meade mentioning somewhere on the box or in the manual that this was a 4mm eyepiece.

So now I know I need a reducer for decent lunar observation. Since they failed to mention the mm of this eyepiece, it should come as no surprise that Meade also fails to mention the use of filters with this eyepiece - neutral density or variable polarizers (which is nice to have for lunar observation), or Light Pollution/Broadband filters for deep-space observation (which is a must-have if you live in/near the city).

You may very well be able to see some deep space objects using this eyepiece with the proper filter - I have no clue yet. I was planning on purchasing filters anyway, so I'll update this review with an answer to those questions....

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reviews: page 1, 2

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