It has arrived. My new Meade LXD75 10″ Schmidtt-Newtonian. Ordered from Telescopes.com, (10% off at the checkout) it arrived a week later in two very large boxes: the largest box which held the OTA, is about 5′ long and bulky. This thing is huge… Fortunatly, the entire telescope was double-boxed. I could tell that it had undergone rough shipping (to be expected – I worked for a while at UPS as a loader, and things do get thrown around a lot), but no problem – the optics were the first thing inspected out of the box and all was good – except that the collimantion was way off from the bumps during transit, but that is an easy fix. Set up was quick (i did not neglect to study the small manual!) and I was collimating and testing it in no time. I was tempted to take it outside for first light, as the sky was actually clear, but I had better read the user manual and get familiar with things first… I will continue to update this blog with testing results this week.