Column Stands & Extensions

Meade Instruments is considered to be one of the most innovative and dynamic companies on the telescope market and is known for its ground-breaking optical designs.

The Meade Instruments company was founded in 1972 by John Diebel as a mail-order business for small telescopes. The first ad appeared in 1972 in the July issue of Sky & Telescope. Visionary John Diebel made it his goal to offer high-quality products at reasonable prices.

In 1980, Meade introduced a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with an eight-inch aperture in the Model 2080 telescope. This optical system, combined with an electronically controlled fork mount (GoTo), is still Meade’s trademark.

The LX200 series telescopes introduced in 1992 and the ETX telescopes available since 1999 have been particularly successful.

In addition to quality optics, Meade has also continued to develop the electronic components of their telescopes - components that make life easier, especially for beginners. With their LightSwitch telescopes, in 2009 Meade introduced the first telescopes able to align themselves in the night sky fully automatically and to guide the user to the interesting objects (GoTo).

But Meade Instruments have much to offer even advanced and semi-professional astronomers – with the LX850 and LX600 series having been developed specially for them. With their Starlock system, these telescopes offer a built-in guiding system. These are mounts that monitor their tracking of the night sky themselves.

Meade went in a completely different direction with the development of their LightBridge Dobsonians. These telescopes work without any electronics. Dobsonian telescopes are designed for visual observers who are looking for a more nature experience of the night sky under dark skies. LightBridge telescopes are designed with portable truss-tube Dobsonian OTAs for this purpose. These Dobsonian telescopes have established themselves very well on the market, and there is a wide range of accessories from third-party suppliers for them.

In 2004, the brilliant developer David Lunt teamed up with Meade Instruments. The Coronado brand, developed by David Lunt, has been marketed and developed by Meade since that time.

The Coronado brand offers solar telescopes for beginners to advanced users, meaning that Meade instruments is also at the forefront of this segment.

Here in the shop, however, we consider Coronado to be an independent brand, since Coronado covers the solar telescope segment as a stand-alone entity and - quite rightly - has a very good reputation.