What is important to you in an eyepiece?

Do you prefer price, performance, eye relief, weight and size, 1.25" or 2" or just what?

Floyd Blue said:

Do you prefer price, performance, eye relief, weight and size, 1.25" or 2" or just what?

Floyd:

That is a great question...

The scopes I use when I am "seriously observing" are all pretty fast, my NP-101, a 80mm F/7 apo, a 10 inch F/5 Dob, a 12.5 inch F/4.06 Dob, a 16 inch F/4.42 Dob and a 25inch F/5 Dob.. Every so often I roll out the 12.5 inch F/6 but even that scope is reasonably fast. All but the 12.5 inch F/6 are undriven...

I consider myself a generalist, I like all sorts of observing but probably more than most I enjoy the low power wide field views and probably more than most, I enjoy the very high magnifications needed for tight doubles possible living along the coast in a mild climate.

- Sharp in the center and well corrected at F/4

- A wide apparent field of view

- Freedom from reflections

- A reasonable amount of eye relief... no 5 mm othos for this boy.

- Affordable and Available on the used market.

So... my main eyepiece case consists of a set of Naglers of varying vintages, 31mm, 20mm, 16mm, 12mm, 9mm, 7mm, 4.8mm, 3.5mm plus a Paracorr, some filters and a couple of Barlows.

I also have a minimalist eyepiece case that I use from my backyard, the eyepieces are smaller, more manageable and work fine is my smaller, often slower scopes... This consists of 3 TeleVue Widefields, the 32mm, the 24mm and the 15mm plus three TMB planetary eyepieces, the 9mm, the 6mm and the 4mm plus a Celestron Shorty Barlow.

I have a variety of other eyepieces but probably >95% of the eyepiece time goes to these two sets.

The good views, they come from good seeing and decent optics that are well prepared, i.e. cooled and collimated. I am blessed to live in an region where the seeing is quite often excellent... That's the big thing.

Jon

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Hi Brendan,
Yup, those are good points, I look for that too.

Floyd Blue said:

Do you prefer price, performance, eye relief, weight and size, 1.25" or 2" or just what?

I'm still a novice in this art. I'm very happy with the set I have. They all work well. I especially like using the 13mm Nagler, which I bought from somebody here at Amart. I had to save up for about 18 months, but it was worth it.

So I guess price is my ultimate criteria... looking for a good deal on a used EP that others have recommended.

Cleers,
Joe

1. That it cost less than the telescope, getting to be close on some eyepieces - lol .

2. No kidney beaning or excessive sensitivity to eye position, (as another poster said), think Radian.

3. A natural look and curvature to the viewing field, some eyepieces make you feel that there is a lot of glass between you and the sky ( I get this with all the Naglers I have owned.)

4. I guess I am old fashioned, but the Takahashi LE's, Meade 4000 SWA's, and Panoptics suit me fine and have the most natural and comfortable viewing for me.

#1 - SIZE: Always a most critical factor for me. I dislike the ergonomic problems larger eyepieces usually cause so prefer 1.25" most all the time and even those need to be not too large.

#2 - PERFORMANCE: This is next most important. But I also don't think all eyepeice should be for all tasks, so for planetary performance the on-axis only is considered and for wide field non-planetary viewing of course the off-axis becomes important.

#3 - PRICE: Generally, if a single eyepiece is > $150 then it needs to be something very special in some way that I'm specifically looking for.

I use everything from early Celestron Erfles, Orthos and Plossls all the way up through modern widefields.

I am fascinated by eyepieces that simply get out of the way of the view. The first example is the 26mm Celestron Silvertop Plossl. The 28mm RKE and 48mm Brandon also share this trait.

Floyd: Long time no talk. But on to the question. Went through a great number of EPs before settling on Tele Vue. Have long learned that there are many good and excellent EPs available. But what suits me are Crisp views and field of view. Being a non-tracking dob user, the FOV is valuable, plus my method of finding objects is star hopping, thus, the FOV becomes important. Therefore, my cadre as it stands now are as follows; 40 Paragon (perhaps to be replaced by a 40mm Pentax), and naglers 20, 17, 13, 11, 9 and 8 radian. Also included is a Para Corr. The only weakness is in the 40 to 20 mm range which may be augmented in the future by a 31 or 26 Nagler. Also, 1.5 and 2X barlows are used when powers higher than that achievable with the above are possible which is seldom in my area. Thus, my desire for something like a 6 or lower Nagler has a very low priority. Dob is a 12" Ed Stevens refigured mirror and a high quality antares secondary. Weaknesses in the system are the mirror mount and focusser.

Jud