Ruud

I have this little scope. I use it with a 32mm GSO Plössl and for a finder I use the tube of a pen, like this: Thanks for the thread. I'll bookmark it!

Many thanks, Martin, the atlas is huge. Enormous. Overwhelming!

I really like this tip by L8-Nite: http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/254918-custom-made-eyepiece-case/#entry2781119 It teaches how you can use empty spray cans to make holes of the right size in foam. Wonderful, simple and effective! I suppose you have to make sure that the cans are really empty before you do this. Thanks to everyone who shows their eyepiece cases here. I visit regularly to have a look at them. Wouldn't want to miss any!

So far I used the 6.5 mm mostly in my F/5 refractor of 500 mm focal length. In that telescope the eyepiece gives 77x magnification and an exit pupil of 1.2 mm. The focal plane of the refractor is flat. It's a 4" so the resolving power is slightly over 1 arcsecond. From my notes:In the late afternoon on the day I bought it, I tested the eyepiece on terrestrial targets. There's a church steeple about a kilometre away, which is covered in grey shingles. They looked fine, showing the same slight colour differences as I can see through my Delos. The view was sharp across the entire field.There were bright sunny spells which I used to test for kidney bean shadows. The result was good: eye placement becomes slightly more critical for my bright-light pupil, but the eyepiece remains comfortable to use. For me, it is suitable for daytime use. The contrast between the bright white paintwork on a window frame and the dark interior behind it (a scene some 50 metres away) did seem to show chromatic aberration. But that was due to the telescope itself: I see the window from an angle and, due to a shallow depth of field, not the whole frame was properly focussed. When the Genesis is not properly focussed it is not colour free. Toward the edge of the view straight edges definitely show pincushion distortion.For these daytime tests I had removed the 1.25" adapter from my diagonal and used the eyepiece as a 2". That works and it makes the whole a bit lighter. Still, it makes the telescope back-heavy by increasing the torque on the altitude axis. This is because without the 1.25" adapter, the eyepiece sinks much deeper into the diagonal, so it needs a lot more back-travel of the focuser. So much that any parfocallity with my other eyepieces is lost. I don’t think I’ll use it as a 2".I later took a look at the night sky, for an hour or two between the showers.I tried to find lateral chromatic aberration using Vega and Deneb, but found none. Sharpness across the view was excellent. The focal plane of the eyepiece looks completely flat to my eye: it did not matter on which star in the field I focussed, all the others became just as sharp.At 77x, both double stars of epsilon lyrae were cleanly split and each pair was separated by a thin, black gap. The ring nebula showed well and had a dark centre. Albireo looked very beautiful with its orange and blue star. Especially the orange star appeared very saturated. The double double cluster in Perseus filled the view with pinpoint stars. I saw no trace of astigmatism.77x is too much for the Andromeda galaxy, which is just too big, but the cores of both M31 and M32 fit nicely in the field. I saw no EOFB.A few days later we had a clear night again and I tried the eyepiece on a gibbous Moon with my 6" F/10 1500mm FL Nexstar SE. Magnification was 231x and the exit pupil 0.7mm. The seeing was good and the view was very crisp and contrasty. The seeing got even better so I put my 1.8x barlow between the SCT and the eyepiece to try it at 415x with an exit pupil of 0.4mm. I saw even more detail then, but the view was no longer very crisp. I think I spent 4 hour studying the Moon's terminator. The Pleiades were dazzling at 231x.At F/5 the 6.5 mm performs very well. Much like a Delos.I wish the weather was better.

Yes Mike, the rubber eye guards definitely need a bit of extra work. And although mine stopped coming off when I flip it up, it still isn't high enough for the eye relief. Fortunately I'm very much in love with the eyepiece itself. --- I also have something else: my apologies and a retraction: I notice that 9 people have downloaded my earlier attempt at an Excel worksbook for useful eyepiece calculations. That is regrettable because it contains an obvious error in the calculation of the field stops. My bad! I'm really sorry. Here is a corrected version of the worksbook: ScopeCalculator18.xls It is still a project in development though. I plan to add a feature or two in the near future. But at least this version (18) gives correct results when you assume that angular magnification distortion is absent and only rectilinear distortion is present.

Hi Mike, About the rubber eyecup: I too prefer it when an eyecup slightly touches my brow. Even on the 6.5 mm with its 18.5 mm eye relief, the wingless eyecup won't reach high enough for that. The winged one is even lower. Prying up the wingless eyecup is a bit tricky at first, but after a while mine has become easier to flip up without coming off. The part that folds down seems to have relaxed a bit and no longer sits as tight around its bottom when it is down. In the beginning I also had trouble folding it down (parts of it would fold in, rather than down). That too has stopped. It has to do with the huge eye lens, I think. The Morpheus has an even bigger eye lens than the Delos. The Delos have their rubber eyecups firmly stuck in place. The rubber is much thicker as well. On my 12mm Delos (my earlier one) the rubber is coarser, duller looking, lighter in colour and much less flexible than on my 8mm (my later one). But the soft, shiny, black rubber on the 8mm, although much more comfortable, is very sticky for dust. I keep them both folded down and only use the adjustable metal sleeve the Delos have. I might get one of the softer Delos eyecups for my 12mm, as the current one is way too hard for comfort. The winged eyecup of the Morpheus was easy to lift up all along. Just gently lift it by its wing. Gently, because as you say both eye guards come off with little force. I use the wingless eyecup only, by the way, as it serves to warn me when I get closer to the glass. Of coarse, if you keep having trouble raising the wingless eyecup, you might consider fixing it in place with thin double sided tape. One day, pretty soon I imagine, Baader will come up with a line of replacement eyecups of different heights for the Morpheus eyepieces. Probably with matching end caps, if the currents ones won't fit. If that takes too long I may buy myself an inner tube of the right diameter, and make my own eyecup. Praise Be, for Baader's Morpheus.

a few more wheels on it and you'd think it is a locomotive. What a thing!

Hi, I've repaired my formula and now I get amazingly exact results. Baader certainly provides the effective field stop diameters, rather than the dimensions of the front lenses. Here's a screenshot of the field stop results I get with the new formula, compared with the values Baader gives. See how the field stop of the 4.5 mm is calculated with a precision of 0.01mm? Attached you find a short pdf document which explains the two formulas I used: one to calculate pincushion distortion (the Morpheus have 15.1% of it), and another to calculate field stops. Both formulas are very easy! Have a go and read the pdf. It will take no more than a minute or two. The pdf: FS SGL.pdf Meanwhile I'm very happy with the 6.5 mm. I've even decided that I have an eyepiece gap in the 17.5 mm range. Bye!

For eyepieces I just look at straight lines to estimate rectilinear distortion (RD). Some have a lot for their afov (panoptics, my Nagler 4.8), others seem to have very little (Delos). RD in eyepieces is always of the pincushion type. I've read that correcting for pincushion distortion increases astigmatism which would explain why so many eyepiece designs allow for it. Measuring RD is difficult because angular magnification distortion (AMD) can be present as well. With AMD, the magnification (focal length) of the eyepiece varies from the centre to the edge of the field. If AMD is of the barrel type, the image looks like it is pasted on the outside of a sphere, and if the AMD is of the pincushion type the image looks pasted on the inside of a sphere. Measuring distortion for camera lenses is easy. To undistort images from camera lenses you can use Adobe Camera Raw (expensive and not always successful) or Hugin panorama stitcher (free and it always works). The settings of the parameters in both programs would give you a reproducible measurement of the distortions present in the original images. There's a guy at ESA who uses Huging for just that purpose. My formula to calculate field stops is empirical. I just tried lots of variations with tangents. Here's a screenshot with some comments, and below it is the worksheet itself, if you want to try it: ScopeCalculator11 .xls (Please see post number 46 for corrected version of this spreadsheet) By the way, I read that the afovs of some of the Delos are smaller than 72°, and that the afovs of the Hyperions are larger than 68°. Now, if the avofs of the Morpheus are slightly bigger than the stated 76°, my field stop errors are as I've come to expect them from the worksheet. In my 500 mm fl telescope it takes a star at the equator just 240 seconds to travel across a 8.75 mm field stop. I'll need no more 15 minutes of clear sky and I can do the drift test three times.

Possibly, the field stops Baader mentions are the diameters of the field lenses, rather than the actual effective field stop diameters. Of the 6.5 mm Morpheus, Baader says the field stop is 8.75 mm, but I calculate 8.62 mm, and my calculated field stops always come out slightly too high. For this Morpheus I get an unexpected 0.13 mm too low. Actually, for all of the Morphs I get results that are too low. Because of this I first expected that the Morpheus would have unusually low rectilinear distortion, but the 6.5 mm doesn't. Rectilinear distortion is quite distinct, about what you would expect in an eyepiece as wide as 76°. (Rectilinear distortion, by the way, is not a shortcoming of an eyepiece. It is far more important that angular magnification distortion is absent, and is saw no trace of that.) By Wednesday the sky should clear up again. I’ll do a star drift test then, to see what the effective field stop diameter really is.

Got the 6.5 mm Morpheus! and it's every bit as good as Bill describes. What a nice eyepiece!

That's an amazing collection of cases, Dave. We need more pictures, in which you open them all, case after case.

First-rate work, Bill. It's an exemplary review.

Hi Andrew, the slowly moving stars are satellites. The most obvious are the International Space Station and the Iridium satellites. The Iridium satellites can show very bright reflections of sunlight, and for the ISS you can subscribe to the Spot the Station service of NASA.

Lovely case everyone. With such well protected and cared after eyepieces, I would not hesitate buying second hand from any of you.

A wonderful instrument. Congratulations, Alan!

Hi all, we're close to a hundred pages now. Does anyone else think it would be a good idea to start a new thread "Show us your eyepiece case(s) part 2" ? Cheers

Problem solved, and a great solution it is.

Hi, I wonder if the observation is incompatible with a quad copter or a Chinese lantern.

Olly, Tim, it's magnificent ! Thank you for putting so much work in it. What an accomplishment !

Ah, thanks.

You certainly are a master in the art of foam cutting, and yours is a wonderful case with beautiful eyepieces, but what is that thing at the bottom?