John

Hard to get a "true" 20mm of useable eye relief with shorter focal length eyepieces I reckon. Many modern designs use a concave eye lens and some recess the eye lens as well so quite a few mm are shaved off the ER

Just noticed that this 8 year old thread is in the scopes section. Probably ought to be in eyepieces - can a kind Mod oblige please ?

I seem to recall that the Nagler 11mm type 1 smoothside is a bit of a rarity. I used to have the 4.8mm and 7mm T1's in their smoothside form - my 1st Naglers in fact. It's interesting that Roland Christen of Astro Physics fame used a 4.8mm Nagler to do critical testing of his companies apochromatic refractors. A lot of folks don't like the 4.8mm Nagler though I've owned all the original smoothside TV plossls except for the 55mm 2" one and had a set of the 1.25" format TV Wide Field's as well. All gone to other homes now though.

Here is the website for the SGL star party so that you can see what is involved and what facilities are needed: http://sglsp.com/ Bristol Astro Society run much smaller open evening type star parties at places such as Dyrham Park (National Trust) and our observatory site at Failand near Bristol. These are much smaller single evening events where usually 6-10 scopes are set up for around 30-50 attendees.

I found this French website with some good finder charts for this nova, if anyone is having trouble finding it: http://splendeursducielprofond.eklablog.fr/la-nova-asassn-17hx-dans-l-ecu-a130872810

Very nice looking rig I have the much older non-GOTO HEQ5 and it does a good job even with my large and long 130mm F/9.2 tripet refractor on board. Your new HEQ5 is far move advanced though

I've tried using a really low power, wide angle eyepiece as a finder and I found it harder than I imagined even with a short focal length scope. A finder needs to show around 4-6 degrees of sky to be useful but in your 8 inch SCT I think around 1.5 degrees is the most sky you can see whatever eyepiece you use. Thats a surprisingly small patch of sky when you come to try and find things with it

I find the Baader Q-Turret 2.25x barlow pretty good quality optically for a low price but with your 25mm X-Cell I think a TeleXtender / Focal Extender / Powermate will give you more comfortable viewing because they won't be pushing out the already generous eye relief as a barlow lens does.

Glad to hear that my Leica zoom is on it's way back to me, cleaned and serviced by Leica and at no cost to myself. As the 2nd owner of this eyepiece I think this is good service They even agreed to time the delivery for when I had returned from my holiday I can continue the evalauation process during the Autumn .....

I use a pair of Opticron 11x70's and find that they can be hand held for short periods but you can see much more with them, astronomically, when they are mounted on a monopod or tripod.

Is really long eye relief the primary factor for you ? I assume that you wear glasses while observing - is that correct ?

Sometimes also known as "paralysis by analysis"

If we ever get together you are welcome to try my Ethos's and see what you think of them

Might be worth a shot with my 12" dob when Cetus has risen a fair bit above the horizon. Thanks for the heads up Michael

Sure, that makes sense Derek As a 9th scope - ideal choice