1rpd 30mm 80degPosted By Herbert Kraus |
I have had very good experiences with the BW-Optik 30 mm Ultrawide eyepiece (which, as someone else mentioned, is substantially the same as the 1 rpd ep you mentioned). I use the ep for auxiliary wide-field views in my Orion 80ED refractor (7.5 focal ratio) to supplement the closer higher power views of the same objects in my 8-inch SCT. For example, last Saturday (August 6) at my club's dark sky site, I admired NGC6231, a beautiful jewel box of an open cluster in the southern reaches of Scorpius, in the SCT at 68x with a 15 mm Panoptic ep; and then I trained the 80ED with the BW-Optik ep on that cluster and the region north of it. This gave me a breathtaking view of the full extent of what has been referred to as the "false comet," which is about 2½º in angular length and consists of NGC6231, Trumpler 24 and Collinder 316. If you have access to back issues of Sky & Telescope, you can get a good idea of what I saw from the photo on page 143 of the magazine's July 1999 issue (minus the probably photo-processed coloring of the nebula at the north of the "false comet"); and you can get more information about the "false comet" on page 102 of the same issue and on page 92 of the July 2001 issue. I don't know whether the APOV of the ep is quite 80º or somewhat less, and I suppose the images around its edges are poorer than those in its center, but for its price it is an excellent tool for viewing extended objects.