Lidl watch

The electronic base (which hopefully would work) and controller.
I understand these do not connect to a computer directly at all and are self contained. If I wanted to connect it to a laptop and use an astronomy program to move the telescope what are my options there? I believe that I would need a serial cable. Is the telescope then controlled by standard commands which are given by astronomy programs or would I need to use a proprietary program from Meade or its associate?

It is possible to use the Meade LPI to autoguide the scope along with Meade's Autostar program for your PC.

Regards
Darragh

Redbeard,
For the money it's a good deal.

As for how to control it.
You can connect a laptop to the autostar handbox with the supplied serial cable and use the software on the Mead cd rom to control the scope.
www.meade.com/autostar/as_suite.html

Although, I have always found that particular prog. cumbersome and fussy to
use not to mind ugly looking graphics.
Starry Night Pro will do the same job and
(for me anyway) a much easier & nicer looking prog to use.
www.starrynight.com/new_snprox.html

But, after having said all that, I still only use the Autostar Handbox to
order the scope around.
I guess the handy thing about pointing it through the PC software is
that you can see on the screen where the scope is looking and then hop to
nearby objects as you like.

As for making an Alt / Az mount.
What exactly do you mean?

I have never used an electronic mount, and from some of the comments I read about them it seemed that when you did not want to use the GoTo ability of the telescope it was easier to use a non-electronic mount, which presumably can be moved about more quickly, and you can save the motors and mount for when you really need them.

Maybe I'm wrong on that.

I was looking for a site or page with instructions on creating one, so that I could how feasible it would be for me to do. I did look through Google, but havent found anything with good instructions yet.

Hi Redbeard,
If you have a fair amount of experience finding objects in the sky then strictly speaking you do not need a goto mount, although it is great for tracking, many goto mounts do not have slow motion control so they are difficult to use manually. A manual mount has the advantage of been very quick to set up and tare down afterwards.

Hi all,

Someone in work who is a non-astronomer has seen this Lidl offer and is considering buying one. Is this the 6 inch Schmidt Newt with GoTo or the 6 inch Newt with the tracking but no Go-To? He would like Go-To so he was asking me about it, but I wasn't sure.

Neill

It's an N6-AT so it's a GoTo. The one with the motors but without the Autostar #497 unit is called an LXD75 N6-EC.

Thanks for the replies.

The Autostar suite seems to cost about €150 including the extra bits and pieces, if ordered over the web from England, if anyone else is interested.

Has anyone done any programming of the serial connection directly? Is there a standard set of commands over the serial cable for all telescopes, so if I had a simple command utility I could instruct the telescope to move to a certain location.