If you’re not lucky and you need to collimate the telescope, you’ll quicky regret buying this newtownian. Collimating a telescope is a real pain, the instructions are not clear and the customer support at Meade is mediocre at best.

After many tries, I was able to collimate the thing and was able to see saturn’s rings. The autostart is a wonderful thing, the tripod is pretty good. I did return the telescope because the altitude lock broke.
Rating: 2 / 5

Telescopes are supposed to be precision instruments, but this scope is not. I found that the gears slipped inside the mount, which makes it impossible slew accurately. Save your money!
Rating: 1 / 5

I ordered this ‘scope because I’d always had a slight interest in stargazing, yet not enough to spend enough for a decent view. Where I live is pretty dark, no street lights, so when I had the opportunity to get this thing by using points on my credit card, I took it.

Got the box, found that some thingy inside the big tube came loose (some lens) and was bouncing around. It did have minor scratches on the big mirror, but I polished them out. I saw where the glue came loose and reglued the lens, and it worked.

The spotting scope is a real piece of work, took forever to get it to point where the big scope pointed.

The “free” $89 software that it came with was crap. It wouldn’t install on Windows XP, and was copyright 2000. Got it this afternoon. The help files and “manual” had links to http://www.starrynight.com, but the links were broken. Went to http://www.starrynight.com and found that the “bundle” had no upgrade path, and the new software was $149. Cheapest I found was here on Amazon at $130. I’ll probably play around with the scope for a few weeks before deciding to get the software. Sure, $130 overall cost for this telescope is good, but $130 for a freebie, well, I have to sit on that for a bit .
Rating: 2 / 5

I ordered the Meade DS2114ATS Telescope through Amazon.com, but it was actually shipped by J&R Music and Computer World (JR.com). It only took a couple of days for the telescope to arrive, but unfortunately it had been damaged during shipping. The smaller, secondary mirror had becomed detached from its mount and was bouncing around inside the tube. As a result the secondary mirror was chipped around the edges, and the primary mirror had numerous scratches.

The telescope seemed to be packed well for shipping and there was no apparent damage to the outside of the box. The main tube of the telescope was packed in three levels of boxes. My impression is that Meade’s process of gluing the secondary mirror to its mount just isn’t strong enough to withstand the rigors of shipping. I decided the quality of the telescope was not quite what I had expected. I returned it to J&R and requested a full refund which I received about 3 weeks later. After doing some more howework, I have decided to try ordering my next scope from Orion.
Rating: 1 / 5

I bought this telescope 2 months ago from a local telescope shop. I wanted a simple “GO TO” telescope and I did not want to spend top dollars for my first scope. while unpacking the scope I made an observation that the primary tube was not packed very well (only one layer of bubble wrap), in any case assembling the scope took about an hour and the first time I started using it I realized the scope motor was failing to engage the lever responsible for the vertical motion (up and down) I packed the scope back in the box and asked the store for a replacement. This is when it gets really interesting; I opened the box, unwrapped the tube and heard something jiggling inside the tube. The secondary mirror has come lose and was hitting the primary mirror and damaged it, so I decided to try to swallow my frustration and attempt to fix it which I did ,I glued it back, looked though he provided 25 mm eye piece and could not notice any scratches, so I continued with the assembling the rest. I took the mount with the motor from it’s box and it was broken in half, at that point I realized that this “THING” is not worth my time, I went back to the store returned it and got a Celestron GT114. All I can say about my experience with the Celestron is it’s cheaper, far better quality, arrived very well Collimated.
took me 10 minutes to assemble. If you are looking for a good quality beginner telescope that would be satisfactory for a long time go with the Celestron GT114, or GT130.
Rating: 1 / 5