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Meade Telescopes

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Meade Instruments Corporation (aka Meade) is a company headquartered in Irvine, California, that imports telescopes, binoculars, spotting scopes, microscopes, CCD cameras and telescope accessories for the consumer market.

Origins and history

Founded in 1972 by John Diebel, Meade started out as a mail order seller of small refracting telescopes and telescope accessories. He soon branched out into larger reflecting telescopes and in 1978 ventured into the Schmidt-Cassegrain that up to that time had been dominated by Celestron Corporation. Meade is arguably the worlds largest telescope manufacturer. Meade has a long history of litigation with other companies over infringement of their patents, particularly with its once bitter rival Celestron.

Products produced by Meade include:

* Binoculars
* Microscopes
* Spotting scopes
* Achromatic Refractors (5 and 6-inch)
* Schmidt-Newtonian telescopes (6 to 10 inches).
* LX200-ACF
* ETX series Maksutov-Cassegrain telescopes ranging in size from 90 mm to 125 mm.
* "Truss-tube" Dobsonian telescopes (currently 8, 10, 12 and a 16-inch model).
* mySKY, a multi-media GPS device guiding users to the sky.

Many Meade telescopes come on alt-azimuth and equatorial mounts with computerized locating of astronomical objects as well as mounts that will aim themselves at any given object (a technology commonly called "GoTo").

Other accessories produced by Meade include the series 5000 eyepieces that are comparable in construction to those of Chester, New York-based Tele Vue Optical's "Nagler" (82-degree field of view), "Panoptic" (68-degree field of view), and "Radian" (60-degree field of view) eyepieces.

Meade also sells under the "Meade" name imported low to moderate cost reflectors and refractors intended for the beginner retail market.

In 2004, Meade acquired Coronado Filters from founder and designer David Lunt, who produce an extensive range of specialty telescopes that allow views of the sun in Hydrogen-Alpha, and more recently Calcium K line wavelengths. In August 2008, Meade announced they would drop the Schmidt-Cassegrain optics system for the Advanced Coma-Free optics system.

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