I recently had occasion to advise a friend who is the proud owner of a brand new 30" Obsession (apparently one of the last; Dave doesn't seem to be taking orders for them any more..) to buy himself a nebula filter for his 2" Naglers and Panoptics. He observes primarily from a slightly light-polluted yard near Lake Tahoe and needed some contrast gain on certain faint DSOs in my opinion.
Lumicon hadn't yet been resurrected to my knowledge, but the Tele Vue O-III was just becoming available, so I confidently told him to grab a 48mm filter from TV, assuming that it would be at least the equal of my trusty Lumicons. On a recent visit to his place, we briefly experimented with my late-eighties Lumicon O-III and the Tele Vue O-III out of curiosity. This was an afterthought at the end of the evening; we'd been working on his starhopping skills, this being his first non-driven scope, and were previously looking at bright objects just for the fun of seeing them in a 30 inch instrument. We chose the Veil as our target - and the old Lumicon absolutely blew the Tele Vue O-III out of the water on this object in the 30! I was quite surprised. The TV did show more natural star colors, but the nebulosity was very dim by comparison, with much lower contrast than shown in the Lumicon filter. The old O-III showed the Veil as indecently bright in the big scope, with a wealth of filamentary detail too extensive to adequately describe.
Has anybody done any comparisons of their own? I'd love to hear some results on other objects, as we didn't have time to do more that night and I had to leave the next morning. I've always had boundless faith in TV products, and rightly or wrongly I expected comparable performance since they chose to use the O-III moniker.
Clear Skies!
Jim
Lumicon hadn't yet been resurrected to my knowledge, but the Tele Vue O-III was just becoming available, so I confidently told him to grab a 48mm filter from TV, assuming that it would be at least the equal of my trusty Lumicons. On a recent visit to his place, we briefly experimented with my late-eighties Lumicon O-III and the Tele Vue O-III out of curiosity. This was an afterthought at the end of the evening; we'd been working on his starhopping skills, this being his first non-driven scope, and were previously looking at bright objects just for the fun of seeing them in a 30 inch instrument. We chose the Veil as our target - and the old Lumicon absolutely blew the Tele Vue O-III out of the water on this object in the 30! I was quite surprised. The TV did show more natural star colors, but the nebulosity was very dim by comparison, with much lower contrast than shown in the Lumicon filter. The old O-III showed the Veil as indecently bright in the big scope, with a wealth of filamentary detail too extensive to adequately describe.
Has anybody done any comparisons of their own? I'd love to hear some results on other objects, as we didn't have time to do more that night and I had to leave the next morning. I've always had boundless faith in TV products, and rightly or wrongly I expected comparable performance since they chose to use the O-III moniker.
Clear Skies!
Jim
