Product Catalog
“Meade telescopes are
designed for everyone from
the casual visual observer
to the most demanding
scientific researcher, with
the dedicated astropho-
tographer in the middle.
No comparably priced scope
will point or track better.
– John Hoot, San Clemente, CA
Advanced Pointing
and Tracking
EXHIBIT 9
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Smart Drive.™ Permanent Periodic Error Correction.
Meade’s SmartDrive technology allows Permanent
Periodic Error Correction (PPEC) on both axes that offers
an observatory standard of precision of 5 arc seconds or
less. Because no worm gear is perfect, no matter how
precisely it is manufactured, small inconsistencies will
always occur in the drive system of any telescope. Meade’s
Smart Drive allows you to train your telescope’s software
to automatically compensate for these tiny periodic errors
in the worm/gear system. This will bring your telescope’s
tracking accuracy up to a level consistent with the
world’s top observatories. The programming is stored
forever, independent of any power source, yet may be
erased, updated or averaged with future programming if
you choose.
High-Precision Pointing (HPP). Finding objects too
faint to see.
This feature is most helpful to astrophotographers
interested in imaging objects too faint to be confirmed
with the naked eye. Or those who want to place an item
dead center on a very small CCD chip. When you turn
this feature on and ask the scope to slew to an object, the
scope will first slew to a star right next to the object and
ask you to center that star perfectly. The star is likely
to be perfectly centered already (that’s how accurate
Meade telescopes are). But once you have confirmed the star’s precise location, the scope will slew
to the nearby deep sky object and place it exactly in the center of your field of view. For normal
observing, this level of precision isn’t necessary (a Meade scope will center objects anyway). But
HPP gives you the confidence to kick off a two-hour long imaging sequence without even visually
confirming a faint object’s existence!
Smart Mount.
™
Added accuracy for permanent installations.
By constantly refining pointing accuracy every time an object is centered and updated, Smart
Mount helps targets fall in the center of the field of view or the CCD chip every time. Smart
Mount is mostly a tool for people who do high-volume automated astronomy (such as supernova
searches). Say, for example, you want your telescope to follow an imaging script and shoot pictures
of various galaxies throughout the night unattended; Smart Mount ensures every galaxy will be
dead center.
a s t r o p h o t o g r a p h y : c h u c k d o m a r a k i / n g c 6 9 9 2 - v e i l n e b u l a / d s i p r o i i