Meade Instruments Polaris Motor Drive - Black (616000)

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Product Specifications

Continuous RA tracking for telescope
Requires 9V battery, included
Simple attachment to telescope in under five minutes

Product Description

Meade DC Motor Drive for Meade Polaris series Equatorial Telescopes. Adds continuous RA tracking to telescope, so operator does not need to manually operate RA slow motion control to keep objects in the eyepiece. For use with Meade Polaris German Equatorial Mount only. The Meade Polaris Electric RA Motor Drive attaches easily and directly to the Polaris EQ mount in under five minutes. With the motor drive attached and turned on, the telescope can move at the sidereal rate to track any celestial object and keep it centered in the telescopic field. With the variable speed adjustment, you can quickly and easily change the tracking speed to track the moon, planets, or sun (proper solar filtering required). The motor drive will keep the object in the field of view for 10 to 20 minutes before re-centering is required on a well polar aligned mount. Polar alignment required for use. Once installed, the RA motor drive may be left permanently attached to the telescope. This motor runs for approximately 40 hours off of a single 9v battery (included). The Polaris Electric RA Motor Drive is compatible with operation in either Northern or Southern hemispheres, and can be switched between the two simply by selecting the proper hemisphere on the N/S switch on the motor’s front panel. Product carries full one year factory warranty.

Product Reviews

Cheap motor for a cheap telescope.

The Meade 616000 motor drive turns the right ascension (RA) fine control for you to compensate for the rotation of the earth. If you’ve polar aligned your telescope mount well, this will keep objects from drifting out of your eyepiece.Unfortunately, the whole Polaris system is an exercise in cost minimization, so the way you attach this drive to your mount is to replace your RA knob. There is no way to do manual fine motion control in the RA axis once you’ve attached this motor to your mount. Good luck zeroing in on anything with just coarse adjustment.If you have a Meade Polaris telescope system, skip the motor, turn the knobs for yourself, and save up for a better mount.

Marginally useful…

Does its job - tracks the rotation of the earth with a very basic motor. It’s easy to mount and comes with everything you need to attach it to your Polaris scope mount. The motor itself is very noisy, and fine tuning the rate of the motor is pretty tricky to get good long exposure shots. Additionally, it makes it difficult to fine tune RA adjustments - luckily it is pretty easy to disengage the motor (one set screw) and switch back to using a cable. The worst part is that having the housing attached to the equatorial mount gets in the way of the counterweight or the optical tube pretty often and limits the parts of the sky which may be observed.Overall, it can be useful in some cases, but those cases are severely limited by how much it gets in the way.

Good deal

Works very well a bit hard to set up but once you set it up then all works as it should.

Meade Instruments Polaris Motor Drive - Black (616000)

I got this for my boyfriend’s telescope. It worked okay. It was difficult to get the exact speed. It’s good for a lighter telescope that doesn’t have a camera attached to it.