tombardier

Thanks again! I've been looking at the William Optics ones, and I think there are two things I'm not 100% happy with. Firstly, I think the clear aperture is rather small, and I'm not sure if that's a problem. I suspect it's ok, because the CA is small in the Daystar too! Also not sure if it's a problem on the Moon, but I think using a Barlow is going to help there anyway?. I gather they don't have self centering diopters? Do you feel the eyepiece positioning is consistent? I'm very likely to just stick a pair of 32mm plossls in and be done with it, but I might need some more flexibility if I'm going to swap between the sun and the moon. Maybe I can simply use various barlows instead of swapping eyepieces! Are you just generally happy with them? Cheers!

Thank you both, for getting back to me, and for the welcome, @Floater. I didn't receive any notifcations, but as you noticed, I've only just joined, so I'm sure I'll sort that out! @Peter Drew It looks like my 32mm plossl gives me 89x magnification, and that seems to be the sweet spot for me. The 26mm plossl gives me 110x, and 80% of the time, it just degrades the image through equipment. It's only with really good seeing that it'll give me fantastic views. I've tried my 40mm and even a 55mm plossl (the most useless eyepiece I own), and the field of view through the Quark itself is just too narrow. Not as bad as the Coronado PST I had before though. I should probably expand a bit on my slight reticence to shell out huge amounts on a quality bino viewer. It's not out of the question that I do shell out (well, maybe not _huge_ amounts), but I've read that some people just don't get on that well with binoviewing, and I happen to have a lazy eye which might make it troublesome. My presciption isn't wild, it's +1.25 on my left eye, and +2.5 on the right. The optician says that I'm probably more like +4.5 on the right, but he wouldn't prescribe that for another 10 years or so (when I get past half a century!). I thought about buying a really really cheap binoviewer just to try it out, but I decided I don't want to go so cheap that I end up not liking it because the equipment is rubbish, not because my eyes are rubbish, and not being able to tell which of the two it is! My lazy eye isn't so bad that I haven't used it a lot for looking down an air rifle scope, with both eyes open, so I'm quite hopeful that binoviewing will be everything it's cracked up to be. I can see ok with the bad eye, but my brain prefers prioritising the signal from the good one, even if that signal is just of the darkness behind my eyelid I'll keep on deliberating. Maybe something will come along that seems like it was destined to injure my bank balance!

Hi, I'm looking in to binoviewing with my Daystar Quark and Explore Scientific AR102 achromat. At the moment, I view mainly with a TV 32mm plossl, and if the seeing's great, I might try my TV smooth-side 26mm plossl too. I also own a TV 40mm plossl, but the field stop is much larger than the aperture through the Quark, so it doesn't make for pleasing viewing. For the moment, I'm really looking to to get the view I do with my 32mm, as I'm pretty happy to just use that for a whole session most of the time! Would it be the case that my 32mm eyepiece would still largely have the same magnification, and therefore probably still be my mainstay eyepiece? Can anyone clue me in on some of the things that I may like to consider in making any purchase? I gather that self-centering eyepiece holders are a boon, for instance. I spend quite a bit of time staring at the moon too, using my old blue-tubed Skywatcher 254mm f/4.7 newtonian, so I quite like the idea of bino-viewing it, but I think solar observation is where it's supposed to really bring things to life, and so my other question is whether I should consider some of the cheaper options, if I decided to discard lunar viewing as a factor, and just stick to monochromatic viewing in H-alpha, on the basis that I wouldn't need nicely colour corrected optics? Thanks for any advice!