I picked up a Meade ETX 90 a few weeks ago, dirt cheap, before Lockdown here in Melbourne. I've been repairing a few things to give it away to a family member as their first telescope. The guy selling it didn't know much about it but he said the light comes on when you power it up! For the price he was asking for it, I thought if there's a bit of money involved to make it work, it will still be a bargain.
So far I've spent about $50 on buying a few extra things and some materials to make a tripod spreader. It's all done now and the thing runs like a gem. What impresses me about this little scope is it's easy GOTO capabilities to find objects and the optical quality of the Maksutov designed OTA.
To be honest, it's best suited for visual observing and using it for astrophotography is quite limited by its size and slow focal ratio. However, for the moon and planets you can get some results, especially with today's dedicated astro cameras.
These shots were done with a ZWO120MMs and a 2X Barlow giving an effective focal length of 2500mm @ f 27. This was probably pushing the little scope to its limits, especially under the mediocre seeing I experienced on Thursday night. The hardest part was trying to find the planet and get it to sit in the field of view long enough to get a reasonable amount of good frames to stack. At this focal length, the mount did struggle, due to its plastic cog drive, to keep the image steady.
I set its Alt Azmth mount to an Equatorial configuration to improve the tracking for astrophotography, there's an option to set it up this way.
