Was the meade 2130 a good choice for my second scope?

[daman01]

Hello everyone,
First I would just like to say thank you for making me feel welcome in this forum. Now, the meade 2130 telescope is my second telescope. My first telescope was a tasco 350X60mm aperature telescope (cant remember) and bought it 3 yrs ago. I made the mistake buy buying it from a camera shop:ashamed: It was good at the time but then got frustrated with it and didnt use it again and i went off astronomy. Now 3 yrs later and 17yrs old i have got back into astronom and moved to the gold coast and bought a meade 2130 telescope for $599 from star optics. I was wondering was it a good choice for my second telescope, and was it too much for a 130mm go-to telescope? And what can i expect to see through my scope?

Regards Grant.

[[1ponders]]

You will see plenty with that scope Daman. Planets, clusters, nebula maybe even a galaxy or 3. The only real problem with your scope is that to get the focal length it has Meade (and others) put a built in barlow in the focuser. Now this "barlow" is achromatic which will give you colour fringing you wouldn't normally get with a reflector. Apart from that I don't know much about the 2130 except what is written in the meade catalogue. As far as the goto is concerned if you follow the setting up instructions the meade goto seem to be pretty good. They certainly are in the LX series. How that compares to the DS series I don't know. Here's a bit of info I found You can find the whole document here http://www.meade.com/catalog/catalog.pdf/GenCat%20p090_093%20NG&DS_2000.pdf

but its a big document mb wise (over 10 meg)

[dhumpie]

You should be able to do plenty with it but you might have some problems with collimation. I had one of these beast (newt with barlow in focuser types) and collimation was impossible! Is this new and can you return it in exchange for a dob or something? I know that the guys at Star Optics are pretty reasonable and if you talk to them nicely I am sure they will do an exchange. That would be a better route.

Cheers,
Darren