mikeDnight

I'm so glad you like it James! They are a bit special aren't they!?

Hi Dave, I've not used any of the shorter focal length in the super Abbe range but I imagine they will be a bit uncomfortable on eye relief. The 16.8mm's in the bino viewer with a barlow are really excellent. In your dream 4" F15 the 16.8 should be good at around X90 and great at X180 with a barlow. They are super cheap so not a great risk!

SIGH! ? Rather stupidly I sold my extender Q, and immediately regretted doing so! Rather than continually screwing it on and off I should have just left it on. It was beautiful! ??? I've definitely got to get another one!!

Finally, the real thing!

Another really nice eyepiece that's as cheap as chips is the Super Abbe Orthoscopic from 365 Astronomy. I use a pair of 16.8mm SAO's in my binoviewer for lunar and planetary observing. They are not so good in short F ratio scopes but in a longer focal length instrument they are excellent! I use a Barlow in my binoviewer on my 100mm F7.4 and the 16.8mm's are sharp to the edge and as tack sharp on axis as can be.

TV Plossls are superb and easily obtainable. Another real beauty that would work well in your scope would be the 35mm Baader Eudiascopic, Celestron Ultima, Orion Ultrascopic or Antares Elite. All 1.25" and all hard to come by at the moment, but they do come up second hand from time to time. Another really nice eyepiece would be the Edmunds Optical 28mm RKE (Rank Kellner), which is still available from Edmunds in York.

I've always fancied a set of Brandons, so if you buy a set, I'll buy them off you cheap if you don't like them.

Hi Alan, After many years of carrying large numbers of heavy high end, expensive, eyepieces in metal foam lined cases, I've found it quite liberating to now store and carry my retro collection in a wooden box. It's more in keeping with my grab and go old school mind set. The art box was bought from Hobby Craft at Preston for a little over £20. Cheaper than making one myself! I wish I didn't love my binoviewer so much, then I could reduce my eyepiece collection even further and use the even smaller version of this box, also available at Hobby Craft!

If you're patient you could keep your eyes open for a SW ED100 Pro. They come up for sale at silly low prices from time to time, and they are truly superb scopes!

Sorry Steve. As much as I feel sorry for you, I'm never parting with this one!

With my 35mm its as if the image jumps out at you, and the eyepiece disappears. They are lightweight too! You don't need to put your eye right upto the eyepiece yet it's easy to keep your vision on axis. I think its in Polinis book on eyepieces that the 35 and 30 are rated highly compared to the rest of the line, though all are great eyepieces!

Alan, there is a Celestron 30mm Ultima on AB& S. Seriously nice eyepiece! Ad number 133289 Or perhaps search for a 35 Ultima or Eudiascopic.

CA is usually an obvious abberation, but graphs and tables can be a little misleading, as they can imply that a short F ratio scope is useless, being crippled by false colour. Often, in practice, a well made short/fast achromat can still render a very pleasing image, and still have a well controlled level of CA. A 6" F8 achromat for example, will show CA, but is still an amazing rich field scope / Comet Seeker. Far more damaging than chromatic aberration is spherical abberation, which will cripple definition, rendering the scope next to useless as a lunar and planetary instrument, as well as harming stellar and even nebulous images. Many SW achromats suffer from significant SA, which is by far the greater of the two evils, yet they are nearly always criticised for their level of CA. SA is nearly always overlooked!

It depends on the target! My most used high mag is between X176 and X200 or there abouts. For an object like Mars, which needs high power to obtain a reasonable image scale while its still only 5 arc seconds, I use X269 to X296. If I tried using those powers on Jupiter it would cripple the view. My scope is only 100mm aperture, which I think gives it some advantage, in that it seems to be less affected by atmospheric turbulance than some larger scopes, making the use of high powers practicle at times. The highest power I've used with effect on my 100mm is X474 while looking at the Moon and Venus, but it was an exceptional night!

Avoid the SW tripod that goes with the AZ5 if you do decide on this mount. Its not good! Its probably best to just buy the head and fit it to a standard aluminium or tubular steel tripod.

As Stu says, your EQ5 is probably the better mount Jules, especially if lunar and planetary are your thing. The AZ5 is an ideal grab and go mount for those field trips, or for observing targets that are unobserveable from your permanent site. The AZ5 would also be a handy mount to have, and easier to use than the EQ5, if you enjoy aimlessly sweeping the sky for fuzzies as its more intuitive to use than an EQ in that situation. For lunar and planetary, which is my main interest, I almost always use my Vixen GP which is permanently set up for the purpose. Not having to carry a mount out makes observing a more regular and enjoyable vent for me!

Yes, several tripods were tried from the basic aluminium, heavy duty aluminium to tubular steel. The issue was with the mount heads, which tremored in the vertical axis for seven seconds or more at the slightest touch. In a slight breeze the mounts were rendered useless! Engineering wise, the AZ5 is quite simple but the porta's are nothing special either. Although the Porta appears to be more solid, there is no clever engineering in either! I can't imagine why anyone would ever want to mount a 8" SCT on a Porta mount, but then again, nothing surprises me anymore!

I used a TV NP101 on a Vixen Porta with Vixen tripod for a year; it was truly awful! Each time my eyebrow touched the eyepiece the thing began bouncing like a tuning fork, making high powers very difficult to observe with. I later bought the Porta ll, thinking it would be sturdier but it was just as bad. The mounts may be ok with short scopes but I've not seen one yet that's sturdy enough for use with the scopes and high powers I use. Interestingly, at the same time as I had mine, I came across two other observers who felt the Porta mount wasn't upto the job. Both the AZ4 and the AZ5 have proved to be significantly more sturdy, especially while using high powers.

In early 2004 a friend bought a Vixen ED second hand and allowed me to play with it over a few nights. It was the longer version of Vixens 102 ED and it was very impressive. My friend however, always had a leaning towards the F6.5 version and not long after buying the long fl Vixen, an F6.5 came up for sale. He sold the first scope, much to my dissapointment, as obviously the shorter scope would be rubbish on the planet's as well as being riddled with CA. How wrong I was! We spent countless hours at the eye end of that Vixen ED, which gave some, not only memorable, but truly spectacular even jaw dropping views of DSO's and planets alike. Years earlier, an observing acquaintance stormed off in a blaze of fury, kicking his garden gate off its hinges, after my Vixen 102mm F13 achromat floored his much prized 8.5" Newtonian reflector, while observing Saturn. Soon after, his reflector came to some unfortunate end! Vixen seemed to me to be just as good as Tak when it came to their fluorite scopes, and they were seriously good across the board with their other refractors too. I've not yet had chance to look through their modern ED's, which I believe are Japanese optics, but I suspect they'll be excellent also!

A 127 Mak would be ideal on the AZ5 Jules, and from my experience its less prone to vibration than the Vixen Porta and Porta ll. It carries my Tak FC100DC F7.4 with no problems, and was even good with paulastro's FC100DL F9.

What make were the recessed 26mm plossls Louis? I bought a 30mm LE a couple of years ago hoping it would be a quality occular. It turned out to be very poor, and I'm being kind with my comments. The 30 LE eye lens was set way down inside the body of the eyepiece making it uncomfortable to say the least, even for a non- spectacle wearer like myself. Optically it wasn't so good either and I'd have been better served by a 28mm RKE. I did possess a 26mm TV plossl some years ago, which was a superb performer, and its eye lens was surface mounted. It was very comfortable!

Excellent! Where did you manage to find one? ?

It was a Meade 26mm Plossl that got me rethinking my eyepiece collection. It's clarity and sharpness really appealed to me, but for the life in me I could never allow anything with Meade written on it in my eyepiece case. I just don't like the company! I've never noticed mushy views through the TV Plossls though, they are sharp and contrasty to me! You weren't looking through a Meade SCT at the time we're you Olly?

I bought mine last July from Astroshop, a European supplier. I'd been wanting one for some time and none were available, until suddenly a new run of the 35mm Eudiascopic's were advertised. I think they are currently unavailable again! You might be able to find a 35mm Celestron Ultima or Orion Ultrascopic, which I think are essentially the same eyepiece. Sadly they rarely come up for sale second-hand, which I suppose is a good sign, unless you're trying to find one. There was a 30mm Celestron on sale on AB&S or SGL a few days ago, though it may have been sold by now. The 35mm Eudiascopic is very similar to the 28mm RKE in that you get the view almost jumping out of the eyepiece. Well worth hunting one down!

And the family keeps growing! After using wide angle eyepieces for years, ive been smitten by some remarkable views while using the simple plossl. So much so in fact that I've been acquiring a set for myself. The Eudiascopic is the only one I've paid full price for, and its worth every penny to me! The remaining ones are all Televue bought second hand, some smooth some undercut, but all superb. The trouble is I now want all the collection of smoothies from 26 down, and all the undercut version from 25 down, just to satisfy my OCD. Again, all second hand of course!