Being quite new to the local area of Gloucs, I found myself looking to have a wander around a real bricks and mortar astronomy shop rather than just search around the 'tinternet. So I found the shop in question [n.b. not in the city] and made my way across there. The shop window looked interesting... there were all the Go-To's, huuuge binoculars, and what did a I spy, some nice EP's looking very smug.

So well so good - time to move inside.

I stepped through the door into said shop and found the "goodies cabinet" , all illuminated with pin spotlights..and thought it was love at first sight. There were all the "green lettered, black bodied" EP's you could ever with for.

Naglers, Ethos' etc.. all in front of me. Of course, there were also a selection of 2" Meade 5000's (massive !) some William Optics UWAN's and SWAN's

It was all I could do to keep my wallet under control. The web is great but until you see an Ethos in the flesh, you cannot get over the size of the beast - it's large and then some.

I decided to resist the urge and wait until I could actually see what these uber-eyepieces have to offer. So.. my Q to you:-

Is anyone who is going to Salisbury taking some posh EP's with them ? I'd love to see how they work on the LB and would really appreciate some help in this area. A few of you have given me some top advice up to now and soon, I'm going to have to act upon it and make some decisions

Thanks a lot.

Steve

PS - Whilst there, I couldn't resist getting the book "Turn Left at Orion" - great book BTW - and the Phillips Deep Sky Atlas, so my retail therapist inside me was appeased somewhat

Steve - there will be some Ethos owners there, some Nagler owners and I'll be bringing my Pentax XW's

James

Steve,

I'll have a range of Naglers and a 13mm Ethos - you are welcome to try them out. I'm hoping to try some more Pentax XW's myself - I've only managed a couple so far !.

John

I'm still torn between Naglers and pentax's Steve. hoping to try a few out so I can make an informed choice.

I have a Pentax XW30 and a 13mm Ethos you're welcome to try out as long as I can have a 'go' on the LB

A very fair swap.

Of course you can

Oh dear albedo0.39 , with all those lovely eyepieces to try out I can sense the bank balance is going to be deeply plundered. I went for years with using the standard issue plossls but when I finally got round to getting a Nagler and a Meade 5000 I was amazed at what I had been missing.

Of course !! - mines the one sporting yellow wheels

That's the bit that frighten's me.

Up to now, I've not spent a whole lot of ££ on EP's and Andrew* + many others have given me heaps of advice that basically translates to:- "Don't mess about, just go for the Nagler, Pentax, Baader Aespherics etc.."

Now, centre field, a couple of published reports out there talk of "not much difference" between your el-cheapo Moonfish and the Naglers but off axis and edge of field they all say that the Naglers / Ethos' / Pentax' are virtually coma free - that's brilliant but now comes the hard bit. Is all that Coma really causing me grief ?

If I'm imaging then yes of course, but visually, how often do I actually find an object and deliberately put it at the outer edge of the FOV to view it ? Never. We nearly all put that object smack in the centre and observe.

The only major plus I can imagine is that the coma free wide FOV means you can actually spend more time looking @ objects rather than "dobserving / nudging". Therefore in this way you might see more of the object.

Also, being quite a decent engineer, I cannot help thinking that 8 bits of glass simply must attenuate all those faint photons more than 4 or 5. Are the laws of physics different for Televue ?

Anyhow, I'm most likely very wrong on all this, and one look through an Ethos is going to make me faint and reach for the rip-cord on my wallet.

Steve,

All the questions you are posing are the ones that I, and I suspect many others, have wrestled with before making our various investments in quality eyepieces.

I think the only way you can answer them is to try these things out for yourself, in your scope, compare what you see with the alternatives and see what the differences, if there are any, are worth to you.

A couple of things I will say:

Regarding the number of lens elements, what you say is obviously correct and does apply to Tele Vue of course - and yet I've tried my Nagler T6's out "back to back" against good quality ortho's and I truly could not discern any loss of contrast, brightness, sharpness etc in the Naglers. Even when I was using a Powermate and a Nagler (9 lens elements !) the image was top quality - to my eyes.

The other thing I've found is with the Ethos (I own the 13mm) I can percieve the "at the limit" details that are harder to see with other eyepieces of that general focal length - eg: it always seems to be using the Ethos that I spot that faint Saturnian moon, the E and F componants of the Trapezium etc, first. I can then usually see these things with my other eyepieces but the Ethos seems to make them that little bit clearer, at least to me.

So, for me, they are worth the price but only you can decide if they do it for you.

John

Coatings and glasses have advanced so much in recent years that with quality eyepieces the number of glass elements used is irrelevant now.

My favourite lunar/planetary eyepiece now is my 6mm Ethos. As an example recently when searching for craterlets in Plato I found that with a Nagler some of the craterlets were discernable, but with the Ethos they stood out sharply with detail. Never mind the Ethos's 100 degree FOV, it's the sharpness and contrast that have impressed me the most.

John

I havn`t really noticed a loss of light with my Nagler or Meade 5000 UWA eyepieces. In fact they have helped me see objects I didn`t see with my standard issue eyepieces, and of the objects I had observed before I could make out more detail. I still do get a bit of coma but the extra fov makes up for that.