Louis D

With a 355mm focal length, you're going to get wide true fields of view with most eyepieces. Assuming you're going to use a 1.25" diagonal with it, a 32mm Plossl would get you to 11x and a TFOV of about 4.5°. To nicely frame the 0.5° wide moon, you'd need something like a 5mm BST Starguider for 71x and a 0.85° TFOV. To explore the moon in detail, I'd probably get a quality 2x or 3x Barlow because quality eyepieces below 5mm start to get expensive fast. For DSOs, you might want to add something like the 8mm BST Starguider for 44x and a 1.35° TFOV. Combining these three eyepieces with a 2x Barlow would yield 22x, 88x, and 142x as well. That last power might only be useful for splitting doubles or for teasing out lunar details. Remember, 60mm isn't going to pull in a lot of light on dim DSOs or provide a lot of detail on small objects.

Well, I know the ServoCAT systems are well regarded.

I would probably attach it directly opposite the altitude pivot point to affect balance as little as possible.

Optically the same, ergonomically different. The WO has a broad, twist up eye cup whereas the APM and Stellarvue have tapered tops culminating in a traditional flip up-down eye cup.

IIRC, the RQF projects/focuses the circles at about 6 feet, not infinity, so there is some parallax with the sky if you move your head side to side. Perhaps this difference in focus with respect to the sky makes them look odd? My 20 year old copy has always had sharp circles, but I can't rule out a design change somewhere along the way, either.

I bought one of these for my daughter's scope, and it seems to work fine. A bit bright with a slightly opaque window, but it gets the job done.

Aside from the APM/Lunt/WO 110 degree 3.5mm and 4.77mm/5mm eyepieces mentioned above, I would go with the 3.5mm/5mm Pentax XWs or Morpheus 4.5mm. The XWs and Morpheus are very eyeglass friendly. However, if you don't mind tipping your head and rotating it to capture the view from edge to edge, you could probably make the 110s work for you for planetary viewing.

I'm at the point I enjoy comparing the views through different eyepiece/scope/Barlow/filter/CC/flattener combinations now. It can make the same old showpiece objects look compellingly different.

No need to be apologetic. I've been at this for over 20 years, so I've been collecting little by little. I'm at the point in life where I have the time to get out more, but my back and neck often ache too much by the evening to even think about hunching over an eyepiece for hours at a time. I'd love to shave 25 years off my body, but that's not happening. What's important is to get outside with what you've got available and make the most of it. What good is a sports car if it sits in the garage year-round for myriad reasons? It's better to have a utilitarian vehicle that gets used every day.

I always start with either my decloaked Meade 5000 SWA 40mm or Pentax XW 40mm (depending on the telescope) to scan the skies to enjoy a rich star field or two and then center objects for higher powers. Next, I tend to jump up to either the 12mm or 17mm ES-92 to have a closer look. Often times, I spend most of the night with them. If I want to get an even closer look, I tend to pop in my trusty old Pentax XL 5.2mm. If it is too much, I'll back off to the Pentax XW 7mm or even Morpheus 9mm. If I think the skies are steady enough, I might pop in the Pentax XW 3.5mm. So, not so much three most used eyepieces as three most used eyepiece focal ranges. I don't find myself using the 22mm Nagler T4 or 30mm APM UFF all that much except in the 127 Mak where I need to downshift focal lengths a bit thanks to its long focal length and high f-ratio.

The best way to go is to actually try each combination on the object in question to see which looks best to your eye. Math can only tell you so much. At some point, you need to experiment to verify the theory.

Yeah, the 35mm Scopos is a special eyepiece. I may have bought the last of the remaining new old stock when I bought it from Europe since they showed as unavailable after that. It is extremely pin sharp in the inner 75% or so of the field and not very much worse beyond that. I mean really sharp compared to my other 32mm+ eyepieces. Stars are just teeny tiny pinpoints. Sometimes I'll pop it in on a rich star field just to soak in the view because its so awe inspiringly well corrected. There's no field curvature and plenty of eye relief. Given its 47mm diameter eye lens and ~17mm of eye lens recession (IIRC), it could have had much, much more usable eye relief. I once screwed off the top cover with the eyepiece vertical just to check. Sure enough, even with eyeglasses, it was very difficult to hold the exit pupil because the eye relief is so long, and there was no reference point to touch with my nose or eye socket. The downside is that it is my second heaviest eyepiece (behind only the 17mm ES-92) at 37.8 ounces or 1072g. However, if I balance for the ES-92s, it's a natural to use it as my finder eyepiece before swapping to them.

Here's the updated 32mm-42mm image which includes the 40mm Pentax XW. I have returned again and again on different occasions to try to capture a better image, but they all turn out similarly, so I went with the one shown. As you can see, it's not perfect to the edge by any means. Even with the field flattener, slight curvature remains, but the camera lens has enough depth of field in my experience to counteract it, so that's not the issue. It's mostly just residual astigmatism. It's not bad, but it is there.

Yes, I forgot to mention I have a TSFLAT2 spaced 15mm in front of the 2" GSO dielectric diagonal to flatten the field. Since I have no focus accommodation anymore, it was maddening trying to take in the entire field at once when vast portions of it were completely out of focus to my eye. Younger folks might never notice the field curvature of a short refractor.

I have the Meade 5000 Plossl 40mm 60 degree version of the ES-62 40mm. While it's exceptionally sharp in the center and almost totally devoid of field distortion, it is only sharp at f/6 in the inner 50% and falls off beyond that. It has a 42.7mm field stop by my measurements, so not quite as wide as the Aero ED 35mm at 44.4mm. For comparison, the Pentax XW 40mm has a 46.2mm field stop. I'll have to check if I have an updated image that includes the XW. Here's my comparison images of 32mm to 42mm eyepieces in an AT72ED f/6 refractor imaged with a Samsung Galaxy S7 camera:

Doing more filter research, it turns out my Minus Violet (MV) filter might have either a 420nm or 455nm cutoff and might also be referred to as a Wratten #4 Yellow. Either way, it's not particularly useful visually with fast achromats. There's also a Minus Red (MR) filter, or a #44A Light Blue-Green/Cyan. However, it isn't really a true analog of the #12 Yellow (Minus-Blue) filter at the other end of the spectrum since it doesn't have a level pass band up to about 600nm. It's more of an arch that cuts off spectrum on either side of a peak around 480nm and fully cuts off by 560nm, well before spectral red.

It's unfortunate that no vendor has stepped forward to purchase a new production run of the 40mm TMB Paragon clone (Aero ED/Paragon ED/Titan II/Paracor/Sky Rover). The only change I would make would be to bring the eye lens up to being closer to the top of the upper barrel to make it more eyeglasses friendly. Since the clone comes with a really nice twist up eye cup, why not?

The 35mm Aero ED would work well as a near widest field eyepiece if you can still find one in stock. It's pretty sharp in the inner 75% of the field of view at f/6. It gradually gets more abberrated toward the edge. The 40mm Pentax XW works really well at f/6, but is quite a bit over your budget.

First off, what are you going to be using them in? Assuming you want to avoid going over a 7mm exit pupil, you wouldn't want to use a 50mm eyepiece in a scope faster than f/7 and a 56mm eyepiece in a scope faster than f/8.

Here's a post on CN that gives the Barlow magnification equation. You still have to work out the Barlow's focal length and the distance between the Barlow's optics and the eyepiece's field stop.

I've been using the GSO 2" 2x ED Barlow, which is sold under multiple other brands, for years. It is very sharp and pairs well with the Tele Vue Panoptic Barlow Interface (TV PBI) to make a poor man's Powermate for use with wide field, low power 2" eyepieces. There's a recent thread on CN discussing it.

The Zhumell brand was more or less discontinued in favor of the Apertura brand by Telescopes Plus a few years back. It's still the same GSO telescope.

Are you sure you didn't undermount that AT60ED just a bit? 😁

Here's an interesting web page that goes into great detail mixing and matching between high quality spotting scopes/eyepieces and astronomy scopes/eyepieces for birding.

I don't know about that. I'd rather transport an 18" Obsession Ultra Compact any day over a 16" Meade SCT: That's 90 pounds vs 318 pounds, not to mention how compact the Dob stores. If you need tracking, there are lightweight EQ platforms for the Dob available.