This will be a short review as I was only able to have the telescope for one night of testing. I will do a follow up shortly. This is Meade telescopes newest Schmidt. It’s compact and very good looking with its white tube and gray mountings.

What I did get to see from this telescope in one night was impressive. With 75% more light collection than its smaller 8″ brother, it was enough to give me some excellent views. These Meade telescopes have a wide field of view making it a good planetary and deep sky telescope.

The first objects on my hit list were the planets and I was not disappointed with the views, they were sharp and clear with a lot of detail and some color. This telescope has very good optics.

While these Meade telescopes have good planetary viewing, the deep space viewing is where it excels. After gliding the telescope over several of my favorite nebulae and globular clusters I was quite impressed with what I saw.

I viewed M81 and M82 with good results. Then came the M8 (Lagoon Nebula), M20 (Trifid Nebula), M16 (Eagle Nebula), and M57 (Ring Nebula). It showed a lot of detail and was very sharp with very little coma.

The Schmidt comes with autostar and 9 speed controller. It comes with over 30,000 objects programmed into the database and slow-motion speeds to follow objects easily. This would be another good telescope for anyone into astrophotography or CCD imaging.

These Meade telescopes are compact making it easy to transport and easy to set up, it took me 5 minutes to have it ready for viewing making this a good telescope for field work.

 Meade Telescopes Recommendation

I only had one night with this telescope but from what I have seen it seems to be a very good Schmidt-Newtonian. It has good optics and a large aperture for good deep sky viewing.