After a number of years of casual use of the 10 inch Dobsonian telescope that I built back in 2001, I dropped in at the Camberwell showroom of the Binocular and Telescope Shop to have a look at Meade's Lightbridge range of telescopes. I had read Richard Brown's review of the 16 inch model on the IceInSpace site and I wanted to see if it was as good as it sounded. There didn't seem to be all that much information / reviews online about it, apart from IceInSpace, and another review by Chris Thomase on the Cloudy Nights site. What I did read seemed all good, and within a few weeks I was the proud owner of a 16 inch telescope - with far more light-gathering power than I could possibly have imagined owning back when I was borrowing a Celestron C8 back during my days at Teachers College.

I built a Dobsonian telescope in 2001, when I was getting back into astronomy. In October 2007 I bought a 16 inch Meade Lightbridge. Many of the modifications that I made to the Meade are based on my experience with the 10 inch telescope. You can read about the Meade Lightbridge modifications here. Since then I have sold the Lightbridge, bought a Celestron CPC 9.25" Schmidt Cassegrian, as I was starting to experiment with photography of the planets and some of the brighter deep space objects. sold that, and have moved on to a SkyWatcher 14" goto Dobsonian. In the middle of 2026 I gave our 10" Dobsonian to a young member of the Astronomical Society of Victoria.