Don Pensack

$450 CDN apiece for Morpheus = $346.50 USD. In the US, they're $299, so you might have saved some by buying from a US retailer unless the shipping is really high. But the UK price of £237 includes 20% VAT not charged for export, so even with the currency exchange, you could have saved a lot of $ by buying from the UK.

They are a more modern eyepiece with better coatings than the older LVWs. I think you'd find them excellent. They are from a superb Taiwanese manufacturer known for excellent apo refractors as well.

The ring on the focuser is 2" in I.D., but the tube of the focuser below that ring is slightly larger than 2" in ID. That's why it is important that the ring have 2 screws to bind the eyepiece, where with or without a brass split ring inside the ring on the focuser.

You can use a conventional 2" to 1.25" adapter in the focuser to lower the 1.25" eyepieces a lot. The ring on the focuser may or may not (depending on vintage of the scope) have a 2" clear aperture. Earlier ones were <2" in I.D. If it does, a 2" eyepiece can be used in the focuser directly without the 2" adapter provided. If it doesn't, you'll have to find an after market ring to replace the one on the focuser. That is readily available in the US, but I don't know about the UK.

https://astrosystems.biz/eyepieceadapter.htm

OK. Baader has had sales from time to time. £170 was a sale price. £217 is a lot cheaper than in the US, where they are ~£261. Price increases have been almost totally, industry-wide, due to increases in: --labor costs (along the entire distribution chain) --raw materials costs and shortages thereof --shipping costs --brokerage charges --devanning charges (breaking apart mixed containers) --storage charges And in the US, a 25% tariff on Chinese-made goods. In business, pricing can be based on FIFO, LIFO, or average If FIFO, first-in/first-out, significant price cost increases can bankrupt a dealer because prices are based on old costs. If average, getting new stock may result in a necessary price increase as the average cost goes up. If LIFO, last-in/first-out, the dealer makes additional profit on the old stock. If the product is short in supply, that may be the only pricing regimen that keeps the business in the black. In my own business, I have a relatively fixed overhead. If sales go down due to product shortages, I could find myself in the red fairly quickly. And many popular products are only intermittently available because the suppliers cannot get stock. No rational retailer will simply raise prices for no reason because it could make him/her less competitive, and the lost sale factor would be large as competitors take away all the sales. So you can bet that an increase in price is based on increased costs somewhere along the chain of supply. I don't know about the UK, but in the US, prices are pretty much fixed by the importers, and all merchants sell for the same price. That price is only a floor price--we are free to sell at a higher price. Yeah, for sure, no retailer is that stupid. So the floor price IS the price. If UK merchants have a similar minimum they have to honor, that could be a reason for a price increase. But a minimal increase of £30 is really minor for a fairly expensive Chinese eyepiece.

The one in the picture seems to have a conical tapered undercut. I've modified the image and added an a-b line for the edge of the conical taper. It's not a straight barrel, if that matters to you.

You can still get an accessory package with a price break on the parts: https://www.televue.com/engine/TV3b_page.asp?id=26&Tab=_acc But I've been a TV dealer for over a decade, And I never saw them include an eyepiece and a diagonal, at least not in the states. They did, at one time, offer the scope with a diagonal, and that was true for the NP series as well. Maybe they were packed with an eyepiece in the UK. With cost increases, though, I'm sure they were afraid that offering the scopes that way would result in too large a price increase. I bought a refractor many years ago that came with rings, dovetail, diagonal and finder. Today, it is a stripped down OTA and all the other items are a la carte. That kept the price increase to a bare minimum, and besides, most refractors are used for imaging these days and the buyer doesn't want a finder (he'll use a guide scope instead) or a diagonal (imaging is straight through).

1.25" adapters vary from +16.5mm to -12.7mm, so changing the adapter for anything 1.25" is a way to resolve focuser issues. If the scope is a SkyWatcher, the stock focuser takes either a tall 1.25" or tall 2" focuser to focus normally. But if the adapter is removed and the visual accessory inserted directly in the focuser ring on top of the focuser, a HUGE amount of in-focus can be gained.

I'm working on a system to accurately measure the "effective eye relief" (from the folded down eyecup to the exit pupil) for glasses wearers. If it works well, it'll be possible to measure it on any eyepiece. I think glasses wearers will be surprised how little effective eye relief it takes to use glasses with an eyepiece. One eyepiece I have that has a design eye relief of 18mm and which I found *just* usable with glasses on had only 14.3mm of effective eye relief. When people look for eyepieces with 20mm of eye relief for glasses, that is not the eye relief from the rubber up, but the design eye relief from the glass, and the depth of the lens varies all over the place from eyepiece to eyepiece. One eyepiece with 20mm of eye relief had 12mm of effective eye relief, and another with 20.5mm of eye relief had 19.2mm of effective eye relief. On paper, both were glasses compatible. In reality, only one was.

So, buy used eyepieces, leave marks on them and sell them as used with marks. I've done that a few hundred times, and at 50% of the new price (not what I paid), they sold instantly. The difference between what I paid and what I received was a "rental cost". If there were an eyepiece rental service, I bet they'd be busy and marks wouldn't matter at all. So it is with eyepieces sold at 50% of new. No one cares about marks, boxes, or anything. If your finances are very tight (and I've been there), and you cannot afford to lose any money, use nylon screws to not leave marks and you can sell the eyepieces for about the same price you paid. All my eyepieces have marks except those in quasi-permanent adapters, and it's never inhibited the sales. The problem comes when you want to sell for, say, 80% of the new price and customers expect the eyepiece to be brand new.

It is always the distance up from the center of the top surface on the eyelens, the paraxial eye relief. I have also called it the Design eye relief, as the housing is usually not externally designed as the lens configuration is designed. IF the manufacturer quotes the eye relief correctly, measuring the depth of the lens will tell you the eye relief from the folded down rubber eyecup to the exit pupil, the "effective" eye relief for glasses wearers. See this discussion: https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/837363-effective-eye-relief-a-few-measurements/

The 17.5mm Morpheus focuses 2.5mm in relative to all the other Morpheus eyepieces. You can use a TeleVue In-Travel adapter (or similar from other brands) to compensate and make it parfocal.

Its design sacrifices 8mm of the 20mm eye relief when all the way down! It's a long eye relief eyepiece with the eyecup removed. I would find another regular eyecup of 49-50mm I.D. to replace the original eyecup with glasses. Without glasses, the OE eyecup works great.

The 13mm Hyperion at f/5.75 (my scope with coma corrector) suffered from minor astigmatism at the edge of the field (easily ignored) and Edge of Field Brightening (EOFB). This latter issue only shows up on very dark fields, as when looking at a faint galaxy or nebula, and not, really, on any brighter object. Star images and focus were quite good on axis to about half way out in the field (center 35°) and fairly good out to about 75% (center 50°) and only showed some noticeable aberrations outside that. With a coma corrector, my scope has a coma free field larger than the 13mm Hyperion's field of view. At f/6, without corrector, coma at the edge will bloat the stars to about 4x their diffraction sizes at the edge of the field in the 13mm. How large that will be to the eye, visually, is dependent on the magnification the 13mm provides. I would put it this way: the Hyperions are not as bad as many people make them out to be. The 21mm and 17mm are the best in the series, while the 24mm, 5mm, and 3.5mm are not even good at f/10.

The eyecup can be removed, saving a lot of weight. https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/635087-celestron-15mm-axoim-lx-how-do-i-decloak/ It makes the eyepiece a LOT smaller and lighter.

Can you? Yes. It improves star image quality and brightens the overall image. It doesn't create more light, though. So if you can use an eyepiece with a 46mm field stop at f/10, your maximum field eyepiece's field stop with the reducer is 46*0.63=29mm That's one of the reasons it is said: " 2" eyepieces at f/10, but 1.25" eyepieces at f/6.3."

In general, how a nebula filter works is to dim the background sky without dimming the nebula. So figure that all you are seeing is the nebula. As is the case with any extended object, it will appear to dim as the magnification goes up. You will see more details in the nebula, however, as magnification increases. So there is always a compromise between brightness and magnification when looking at any nebula. Otherwise, we'd all use the largest exit pupil possible with every nebula. The fainter the nebula, the lower the maximum usable magnification will be, with or without a filter. Nebulae that perform best with an H-ß filter are usually large and quite faint, which leads to better results with a large exit pupil, like 4-7mm. Nebulae that perform best with a narrowband (UHC-type) filter tend to be much brighter, so smaller exit pupils will be fine, down to perhaps 2.5mm at a minimum. Nebulae that perform best with an O-III filter fall into the large and faint (Crescent Nebula, Veil) or small and bright (many small planetaries). With the large and faint, exit pupils of 3-7mm seem to work best, while the small and bright might be suitable for as small as a 2mm exit pupil. though I would point out that many small bright planetaries show the most detail with exit pupils under 1mm, which is a magnification not suitable for filters. So the brightness of the object and its emission profile will determine how small an exit pupil you can use, and the emission lines will determine which filter will work best. Larger H-II star forming regions (M8, M20, M17, M16, M42 will work best with the narrowband filters passing both H-ß and O-III Planetaries, supernova remnants, Wolf-Rayet excitation nebulae will work best with an O-III filter. Large, faint, nebulae with almost exclusively hydrogen emission, will work great with an H-ß filter (example: NGC1499, IC434 behind the Horsehead)

The eyepiece is easy to use, light in weight, yields nice bright stars and has a near maximum 2" true field, with a well-behaved exit pupil. In your scopes, you will see astigmatism in the outer 50% of the field, but since it is such a low power, 15x in the NP101 and even less in the 48P, with a 6.7-7.2mm exit pupil, your own eye's astigmatism may dominate 😄 It isn't the equal of the Morpheus but it is basically OK as a very low power "finder" eyepiece. The field will remind you a lot of a binoculars image--very wide true field. Performance of the eyepiece gets a lot better at f/8 and longer. At f/5-f/5.4, it's being pushed a bit past its limits. I would use it when you want a truly larger true field view, especially of asterisms like the Coathanger, Kemble's Cascade, the Fairy Ring, etc., or large nebulae like the North America nebula, Veil Nebula, California Nebula, et.al.. It will sharpen up a lot when a nebula filter is added.

Brand new item. No economy of scale, yet. No amortization of the development costs yet. Still less expensive than Nikon, Leica, Zeiss, and Swarovski Zooms.

My IPD is 63.5mm and I have no problem at all with these eyepieces in a binoviewer. I've even used eyepieces 54mm and 58mm in a binoviewer with no issues. The larger one had a very long eye relief so my nose was nowhere near. But these? No problem.

If the O-III extends upward far enough to capture the 511nm and 514nm C2 lines, it could be a decent comet filter. The Starguy was (it's no longer made) identical to the Optolong. Not all the 18-28nm wide O-III filters (all too wide for O-III use) extend upwards far enough to catch those lines.

I noticed the light loss in daytime use in an 80mm Pentax ED spotting scope of f/6.5. Use of telescope eyepieces in that scope made the images so much brighter it was a different scope. It didn't matter than much in daylight use. At night, though......

To be more exact, the only issues owners of the Ultrablock filter have encountered is that the bandwidth can be slightly misplaced, clipping either the 486nm H-ß wavelength or the 501nm O-III wavelength at a much lower transmission. My lab-tested sample had transmission % at 486 of 85.9%, at 495nm (O-III/2) of 95.4%, and at 501nm (O-III/1) of 82.8% The bandwidth wasn't misplaced in the spectrum, as FWHM bandwidth was 482nm -508nm (26nm), plenty of room to get transmission above 90%. That bandwidth is similar to TeleVue, Lumicon, and Astronomik. It just wasn't a good curve. A test of 8 of them here: https://searchlight.semrock.com/?sid=a08a1af9-84ee-49d2-959d-153d7e7c0eb8# showed H-ß transmissions from 70.3% to 97.4% and at 501nm (O-III/1) of 82.4-95.6% That variability is why the Orion Ultrablock is not considered one of the premium filters. Nonetheless, 2 of 8 were superb, and 4 of them had nice bandwidths, just with a bit lower transmission % than the higher priced filters. That would only be an issue if used on a small scope of 80mm or smaller. So your odds of getting a decent one look to be 75%, and a superb one of 25%, based on the 8-filter sample. Last, Orion uses a different thread on their filters, so threading them into regular eyepieces can be problematic. Know this: At only 7g for a 1.25" filter, only 1 thread really needs to catch to hold the filter on. So if it doesn't thread in more than a couple threads, that is really not a problem. Internet Forums make a big deal out of that, but I've used Orion filters on and off for decades, and never had one fall off. Yes, the wider UHC filters (ES, Optolong, StarGuy, Astronomik UHC-E, etc.) do not provide the contrast enhancement you want. They're less expensive, which is why they've sold. Here is a US-oriented listing of available nebula filters (though pretty applicable in the UK): https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/817105-2022-nebula-filters-buyers-guide/ I note there are some photographic filters now that perform as credible narrowband UHC-type filters, but they are also not inexpensive.

The XL (on the right) was very significantly darker at each focal length than the corresponding XW fixed focal length eyepiece--almost the difference of adding a neutral density filter. It's OK in bright daylight, where the light loss doesn't matter as, for example, in spotting scopes. But for astronomy? My advice is to look elsewhere.