Louis D

Do you mean the eye lens end? I believe it is the top with the angled dashed lines implying sightlines from the eye. Additionally, the little triangles at the bottom represent a cross section of the physical field stop ring which is generally beveled in shape. The lens above it is called the field lens. The field stop faces the objective lens or mirror. Try stacking the lenses on a short dowel or tube, and then slide the barrel over them. Dropping the lenses down into the barrel can cause them to tip, jam, and chip.

Get out a pair of binoculars and look at Orion's Belt. You'll suddenly realize there's a rich open cluster surrounding them, Collinder 70. You'll wonder why you never noticed it before. Collinder 70 is all of those smaller, bright blue stars as well as the three belt stars as seen below:

God I'd feel so pressured to give a good review if I was loaned eyepieces by y'all. After all, if I ripped them, I'd probably be cutoff from getting any more shiny new playthings without cost. 😆 Thankfully, I'm on the other side of the pond, so I don't have to worry about such things. Since I'm an equipment hoarder, I don't have to worry about destroying resale value with my unbiased reviews. For instance, I pretty much trashed the 26mm Meade MWA (along with Ernest), so I can pretty much forget about recouping my sunk costs on it.

I keep my 60mm finder wrapped in two or three layers of bubble wrap in a duffle bag's side pocket with my daughter's 127mm camping Mak in the main compartment. The illuminated eyepiece is in a pick-n-pluck eyepiece case (actually a Plano four pistol case) with the rest of her camping eyepieces. I say "my finder" because I wasn't using it and am loaning it out to her long term. She just can't sell it or give it away.

Sounds good. The only way to become more experienced is to get outside with your equipment and compare the views with different eyepieces (and telescopes in the future).

I avoided the WO BVs because they don't use self-centering collets. I went with the Arcturus branding instead. Even with those SC collets, I have to be careful with eyepiece undercuts causing eyepiece tipping. Also, the images won't merge if I spin either diopter adjuster, so I have to keep them both all the way down. As long as I pay attention to these details, I don't have image merger issues with them.

Not if you're overseas. I wanted to return an eyepiece to Germany once, but we couldn't figure out how to get a refund of my US import duty and avoid German import duty and VAT, so I beggared off doing a return. Perhaps the retailer I was working with was mistaken and there is a simple process involved. Too bad you don't have someone like Bill Paolini over there to run your new lines through their paces like he did for the Paradigms when they were introduced. After that report, they sold like hotcakes under all brandings (a rising tide lifts all boats). @John used to do a bunch of reviews using eyepieces loaned to him by you, but he retired from doing that some time ago. Do you know of any comprehensive reviews or reports on these Long Perng lines? Their ED and APO refractors are terrific, so there is great promise for their eyepiece lines. If these were $60 eyepieces like the BST Starguiders and LP's 55º LERs (such as your StellaLyra version), buyers would be more likely to take the plunge on an unknown, but the 68° and 80° LER lines are much more expensive than that. Once you get up into the price range of new ES, APM, and Baader eyepieces and used Vixen, Pentax, Nikon, and Tele Vue eyepieces, deep pocketed buyers become much more discriminating. It would be interesting to see these go head to head with Pentax XW, Baader Morpheus and Hyperions and Omegon Redline eyepieces as well as TV NT4s and the various 100° eyepieces that produce a 70° view when wearing eyeglasses. That way, buyers would be better informed about where they slot in quality and ergonomics wise to make a balanced decision with their money when buying LER eyepieces. I wish you luck with these new lines. Competition is always good to improve the hobby. I'm sure you had to outlay a bunch of cash to stock these eyepieces, and we all appreciate the risk inherent in that choice.

Here's a photo of the above bracket holding a phone on an actual telescope with a 3-way finder bracket.

As far as the StellaLyra 68º line goes, the only other branding I've ever seen them marketed under was Levenhuk Ra ER20 WA. I can't recall anyone ever reporting on them, let alone writing a comprehensive review of them. Maybe you can turn up something with some deep diving internet searches on the brand name. I know they're made by Long Perng in Taiwan. They also make the 80º and 55º LER lines of eyepieces sold under various brand names. The latter is well regarded in the 12.5mm and shorter focal lengths across many brand names. You're right, the new price is relatively high and resale value is iffy at best for them. Caveat emptor.

I went with a Hercules Herschel Wedge. It works quite well and doesn't heat up the back finder/heat dissipation plate with my 90mm APO. I also put a Daystar/Thousand Oaks solar filter on my 9x50 RACI and added a solar peephole finder. Here's the wedge and solar finder in action: The front view: A closeup of the finder/heat dissipation plate in action: A closeup of the solar finder in action: The view through the solar filtered RACI on a partly cloudy day: And a view through the eyepiece of the sun using the Hercules wedge:

I had a spare moment today, so I setup my 90mm APO with the triple finder mount with a couple of combinations of nighttime and solar finders from different angles. I had it backward in the above post about where I put the GLP and QuikFinder. The GLP protrudes too far back to be in the top position and the QF sits up high enough to not have eyepiece interference. The phone is for when I use SkEye to locate difficult objects. I forgot to take a picture from underneath, so I'm including an earlier image of the bracket I made for it. Notice how the 9x50mm RACI sits perfectly in line with the plane of the altitude axis for best balance. I couldn't think of a useful third solar finder, so I left a finder shoe empty.

I had one of those from the 70s as a kid. I wonder what ever happened to it? Plastic singlet lenses made for some very distorted/chromatically smeared views as I recall.

You want the the CG (center of gravity) of your setup to pass directly through each rotational axis. I'm guessing your DEC axis has bits and bobs hanging asymmetrically off of your OTA forcing the CG in that axis of rotation above or below the actual rotational axis. It's probably directly above or below it with the OTA horizontal, so it balances nicely in that orientation. I have a similar issue visually with my alt-az mount at high altitudes when using heavy eyepieces. The weight protruding up and away from the diagonal has to be counterbalanced by a similar amount of weight protruding down and away from the OTA on the other side of the altitude axis to prevent my rig from turning turtle.

I'd say everyone needs a quality 32mm Plossl as a frame of reference when building out an eyepiece collection. They're not that expensive and punch well above their cost.

I haven't tried a 32mm GSO Plossl in an f/5 scope in recent memory, but it will perform quite decently as compared to the cheaper, moderate wide field eyepieces like the Starguiders. It's also sold under the Revelation brand in the UK. Look for Taiwan instead of China for country of origin. I don't know how well the 32mm Celestron Omni, Skywatcher SP and other Chinese sourced Plossls (Synta possibly?) stack up against it having never used them. All are 4 element symmetric designs in actuality. Differences come down to attention to details such as quality of lens polish and figure, quality of multi-coatings, and stray light control. Tele Vue Plossls will have better edge sharpness in fast scopes thanks to their convex instead of planar outward facing surfaces, but not enough to justify their pricing.

Here are comparison images through some of my eyepieces using a phone's camera in those focal length ranges to give you some idea of what the resultant image looks like. The telescope used was a 72ED f/6 refractor. The 25mm Paradigm is the same as the BST Starguider and the 32m Plossls will look very similar to the 30mm NPL. Open them at full image scale to get a better idea of the differences since the pixel scale is the same at that point. Notice how much sharper the Plossls are at the edge compared with the 25mm Paradigm/Starguider. Also notice that the former are showing slightly more true field of view than the latter. You would need to move up to a 24mm APM UFF to get similar true field and edge sharpness as the 32mm Plossls.

The higher power, wider field eyepiece will show objects at a larger image scale with a darker background leading to better contast. On the other hand, at a given price point, the higher power, wider field eyepiece will generally be less well corrected edge to edge. The 25mm BST Starguider is not sharp to the edge at f/6, let alone f/5, in my experience.

If your budget were a bit higher, I'd say the Sky-Watcher SkyMax-127 AZ5 Deluxe for £495. Fairly compact except for the tripod legs. I put together a similar setup for my daughter's camping trips. Next, I would got with a Sky-Watcher Heritage-150P Flextube Dobsonian Telescope for £238 on a photo tripod with a ball head of unknown cost along with a dovetail clamp as pictured below: Either one would be fairly compact and transportable and yet would show you solar system objects with ease.

Budget, transportation, weight limits, setup time, etc. limits please.

Wait, don't you mean 196cm or 1.96m frame? I've been led to believe by folks on SGL in other threads that only Americans are foolish enough to carry on using non-metric units in any capacity. That's my two penn'orth (or is it two pennies worth or two cents worth?). As far as small telescopes, I've got a 60mm Russell Optics OTA adapted from a binocular tube that works well as a RACI scope with a 90 degree correct image prism. I've also got a 60mm Kasai PIco-6 Mak with loads of spherical aberrations. I've got a home built PVC and gaffers tape finder scope using a military surplus 63mm achromat of about f/4 and two 2" right angle surplus prisms mounted 90 degrees to each other. It will accept any 2" eyepiece for insanely low power views.

Could you elaborate? Is it blurry across the entire field, only at the edges, suffers from massive field curvature and/or kidney beaning galore, etc.???? Is it the same as the 30mm GSO SuperView 2" eyepiece? Is it less sharp in the inner 50 degrees than a typical 32mm Plossl?

Pinholes can be safely covered with dots of opaque fingernail polish without significantly affecting optical performance.

Found a US Amazon seller and sent the link to the wife (who has Amazon Prime) as a "gift suggestion". She kind of owes me a Valentine's Day gift I actually want. We'll see if I get it.

Yep, appears to be the same part.

Okay, how about this one?