The Meade "Super Plossl 4000" EP's offered at $99 are good eyepieces and certainly worth the money. 20 years ago people would have killed for them! But times and manufacturing technologies change. People take one look through a TeleVue Nagler or Panoptic and they are spoiled rotten for life! This may well happen to you down the road as well. I personaly apply the eyepiece to the task at hand. Sometimes a low power with an 80 degree view is best for the job, sometimes a 5mm with a 50 degree is warranted. For up close and personal with the Moon I would imagine you would want to have the high magnification over the wide FOV. How you get there is for you to find. But the Meade EP set and a good Barlow so you don't squish your eyeball is certainly an excellent start! Wish I had that when I was starting out in the early '70s. Back then ANY decent achromatic 5" refractor(no such thing as goto's)would have cost more than a new car! The best EP's were limited to Orthoscopics and those cost about 4X as much as the entire Meade set in '70s $$$.

If you want to get a feel for a good 2" EP and what it is like to "llok through the window of a starship" I can suggest the following animal:

http://www.astrobuffet.com/ab/ab_products.html

This monster, at $95 + shp., is a VERY nice EP. And, unlike the similar TeleVue Nagler, it won't cost you $620! It's an excellent introduction to what a 2" is all about. I will leave you with one more link. This is for all those extra goodies you may well find yourself wishing for as the Earth revolves. The proprietor, Jim Henson, is a great guy and really will bend over backwards and light himself on fire for you. In fact one of the goodies he sells for use on LXD55 mounts came from a suggestion I made for an improvement. He had the beta in my mailbox inside a week for me to test:

http://www.scopestuff.com/

Anything Else?

Dave