Telescope Reviews: Meade LXD75 GOTO Mount

A few personal observations about these mounts: I have both an LXD55 and an LXD75 mount. The first thing I noticed about the LXD75 as compared with the 55 was that the motion of the scope along both axes is incredibly smooth. The second thing is that the tripod is much heavier duty and more stable. I have no trouble mounting a Celestron 9.25 inch F10 or a Meade 127 mm ED/APO refractor on the LXD75. This would not be possible, at least for photographic purposes, on the 55. The autostar GOTO function works OK on both but you have to educate the mount on a bright star within a couple of binocular fields of your desired object to find it accurately. Even then it will probably be necessary to use the "slew" spiral to put the object in the field of view of a 25mm eyepiece. The polar alignment scopes on both scopes are fine. The ALT/AZ adjustment knobs are a little better on the LXD75. Neither mount exceeds 30 sec unguided tracking of an object at 1250mm focal length with polar alignment done by the polar alignment scope. Longer unguided exposures result in noticible trailing. I don't know how they would do if the drift method of alignment were used since I never have the time to pursue that. With either of my heavier OTA's, the LXD75 needs an extra counterweight to balance. I just take the weight from the LXD55 and move it to the 75. Both mounts have wicked backlash. Even if the OTA is near perfectly balanced you'll frequently get a "check mount" error when slewing to an object. Ignoring the error message usually results in a slew which gets you quite close to the desired object however. The battery pack that comes with the scope (minus the batteries) runs out of juice quickly and I have to change the batteries every new night I go into the field (6 alkaline D cells) which gets expensive. At home, I just use a 12 volt DC adapter. Finally, in the field I have to level the mount using a large carpenter's level that I lay across the accessory tray in two directions, zeroing the bubble. It doesn't seem to matter whether you choose the "easy" alignment; the one star to two star alignment procedures... they all result in about the same GOTO accuracy in my estimation. Usually I just ignore these procedures and use the OBJECT fundtion and select STAR, NAMED to choose a couple of bright stars for myself. The scope comes within a couple of binocular fields of the star and then I center the star manually and push the ENTER button. That gets the scope into a useable GOTO mode after rough polar alignment. Otherwise, you are stuck with the star selection of the alignment subroutine and most of the time the star the AUTOSTAR picks is not one visible from where I am... its either in the trees or behind a building! Hope these comments are useful. Overall, I like the mount but can't wait until my Takahashi mount arrives in a month or so!

Rick Evans