Louis D

You could go with either a goto Dob and derotate video frames while stacking planetary images or a Dob on an equatorial platform and not have to derotate frames. Either should be doable on your budget. The latter would work better for DSOs should you ever want to go in that direction.

The same way they wore 6" wide ties, leisure suits, and any other of a large number of questionable fashion choices:

If the focal ratio of your 85mm is a bit longer than the 10" Dob, you could add a 41mm Panoptic or 40mm Pentax XW for an even wider TFOV without exceeding a 7mm exit pupil. Both telescopes could benefit from a 5mm to 6mm eyepiece while still maintaining a very usable exit pupil for highest power observing. 159x is not all that high of a power in reality. You'll need a bit more to resolve globular clusters.

More likely as a US retailer, AA would have been on the hook to pay royalties to the Back family for use of the logo which they likely still own the rights to. The Chinese company you bought from is under no such legal requirement because even if Back had registered his trademark in China, their TM enforcement is woefully inadequate.

We have all had those moments in our lives. We won't tell anyone if you don't. 😁

If I'm not mistaken, some folks with limited focus accommodation who don't observe while wearing glasses can also perceive a blurry field stop because they have to move the eyepiece off of the scope's focal plane to compensate for their near or far sightedness. Thus, the field stop is no longer positioned at the focal plane on purpose by the user. This was certainly not the case for the OP's ortho, but I've read of many folks complaining about blurry field stops while not wearing their glasses without realizing the connection. That's also why I always focus my eyepieces with glasses on before taking my FOV images. This is particularly difficult to do with eyepieces having less than 5mm of eye relief, but I manage.

Are they Chinese made perchance? Chinese stainless steel is notorious for rusting in grills, kitchen knives, and other usages. In comparison, I've had no problems with American or German stainless steel products rusting. You can try using an aggressive brass or stainless steel cleaner and then sealing the surface with a clear urethane coating after you're done. However, there's no guarantee it won't return. I would just live with it knowing it has no affect on its usefulness.

For lowest power at a reasonable intersection of price, weight, and performance at f/6, I'd recommend the 35mm Aero ED SWA. It's 44.4mm field stop diameter will just about max out your largest possible true field. The inner 75% is quite usable while the outer 25% isn't too bad given the price, size, and weight. Otherwise, I'd say you're in a good position to get started with your existing eyepieces and Barlow in the new scope.

Probably wouldn't hurt to thin it out if it is exposed and could get on your fingers. From there, it would get on all of your equipment. It should work fine with a very thin coating. It's not like it's a load bearing surface as an axle on a mount would be.

That, and it has almost exactly the same focal length as the TV Big Barlow, so it couples quite nicely with the TV PBI if you can find one used to make a poor man's 2" 2x Powermate for use with longest focal length eyepieces. By comparison, the PBI makes a mess of the image in the 2" Orion Barlow because its focal length is way too long. I can't really describe what happens to the image other than to say it gets very messy and headache inducing.

For astrophotographers, the $400 Astrodon OIII is worth it over the $230 Baader OIII if just to get rid of halos around bright stars: Can you imagine trying to clean up all the halos around bright stars in a typical image in post processing?

I just remembered I had taken images through my 127 Mak of most of my eyepiece AFOVs, but haven't had the chance to composite them yet, so I went ahead and did the 32mm to 42mm group and posted it in my thread below: Follow the link above and have a look at the changes going from an f/6 AT72ED to an f/12 127 Mak. It includes both the 35mm Aero ED and 40mm Meade 5000 SWA as well as some modified Plossls and a true Erfle (three achromat variation) for comparison. I think it supports my position that the 35mm Aero ED lies between a modified Plossl or Erfle and a Panoptic type design. I don't have a 36mm Baader Aspheric to test to see if it falls into the same category, but I'm certain it probably does.

Here's the 32mm to 42mm 127 Mak group, minus the military surplus eyepiece that I forgot to include when taking the images: Here's the original group image through the AT72ED at F/6: It's pretty clear that everything improved quite a bit going from f/6 to f/12. However, the AFOV of some eyepieces, especially the Rini MPL 38mm and Rini Erfle 42mm, changed somewhat. Since neither has a defined field stop, this doesn't surprise me all that much.

I've measured my 35mm Aero ED to have a 44.4mm field stop.

I never said I own a 36mm Baader Aspheric, but based on everything I've seen and read online, it performs similarly to the 35 Aero in that it is an improvement over the Erfle design, but not corrected to the level of a Panoptic or XW.

I was comparing the 35mm Aero extensively last night against other, much better corrected widest field eyepieces such as the 40mm Meade 5000 SWA, and it was pretty poor on the moon in the outer 30% at f/6 even with a CC in comparison. From online images I've seen, the 36mm Baader seems to be similar. Even in 2x Barlows, the 35mm Aero would not clean up very well in the outer 20%. I just didn't want the OP to buy one and be disappointed with it in his 14" Newt. It would probably be fine in a f/12 to f/15 Mak, though.

The 35mm Aero isn't going to be much, if any, better than the 36mm Baader Aspheric. The older 35mm Baader Scopos is significantly better, but narrower. It's also heavier than the 12mm ES-92.

Mine looks identical to this one since I bought mine in 1998: I didn't notice any significant change to the exit pupil of either ES-92 when using this Barlow. However, the shorty GSO ED Barlow made blackouts due to kidney beaning a bit more prevalent in the 12mm. Screwing the GSO ED optics section onto the 12mm made matters even worse. However, I was still able to use them. I did try the notoriously SAEP riddled 26mm Meade MWA, and SAEP also got worse with GSO ED Barlowing. I never noticed the eye relief getting longer with any of them, just SAEP getting worse. It seems that long Barlows are gentler on SAEP than shorty Barlows, perhaps because the rays are not diverging so strongly as they enter the eyepiece. I forgot to mention that you can't always use a long barlow on a telescope that uses a diagonal unless it has a lot of in-focus available because they have to be inserted 4 inches or so and then the focuser needs racked back out about 1.5 inches. Thus, it needs inserted about 2.5 inches to maintain focus position. That means that if you can only insert it about 1.5 inches into the diagonal, you'll still need at least another inch of in-focus, perhaps much more. On a Newtonian, this is not an issue. I also forgot to mention that screwing the GSO ED Barlow onto longest focal length eyepieces truncates the outer 25% or so of the field. It's not a sharp cutoff like with the Orion. Instead, it rapidly fuzzes out. This is the same effect I see when using the Barlow section that came with my 20mm/30mm Agena 80°, so I never use it that way. I've never even done a photo test through it in that configuration because it's so bad.

I tried both ES-92s in a variety of Barlow/PBI/CC combinations tonight to view the moon with my 8" f/6 Dob. The cleanest view would have to go to the Orion Deluxe 2" Barlow. It was simply sharp across the field. The GSO ED 2" Barlow was close behind, but caused (or failed to mask) a bit of field curvature and slight sharpness issues at the edge. Adding the PBI to the GSO ED seemed to flatten the field, but introduced edge aberrations of some sort. With no bright stars handy, further diagnosis will have to wait. For the longest focal length eyepieces, there was definite field truncation with either Barlow alone, but the Orion was again sharper across the field. The GSO+PBI eliminated the truncation, but the image wasn't as sharp across the field. Adding the GSO CC into the mix (between the eyepiece and either Barlow) did nothing to sharpen the image of the Orion Deluxe with the ES-92s. I would say the image was much better without it. Results were similar with the GSO ED. However, adding the GSO CC to either Barlow eliminated the field truncation seen with the longest focal length eyepieces. It was acting a bit like a PBI, apparently. I was undecided if the GSO ED + PBI was better than the GSO ED + GSO CC with longest eyepieces. Going GSO ED + PBI + GSO CC would seem ideal, but again, the results were mixed with longest eyepieces and downright bad with the ES-92s. I think there's just too much glass and too many interactions going on. Screwing the GSO ED lens element directly onto the bottom of every eyepiece resulted in a sharp inner 50% and a dreadful outer 50%. Literally all eyepieces turned to a blurry mush that couldn't be refocused in the outer 50%. Highly NOT recommended. My recommendation for the ES-92s would be to try to find a Japanese made Orion Deluxe 2" Barlow if you have a Dob and skip adding a CC to it for use with the ES-92s. Barring finding the Orion or another vintage long 2" Barlow, the GSO ED is a decent alternative. I'm not sure how much improvement a genuine TV Powermate would yield as I could see no significant image degradation introduced by the long Barlow. There was a tiny bit introduced by the shorty GSO ED Barlow around the edges. It was a subtle difference. The 12mm ES-92 in particular did best with the Orion alone. Adding either the PBI or GSO CC to the GSO ED led to less sharpness, so less is more in this case. The good thing is that these Japanese 2" Barlows turn up for decent prices every once in a while on the used market because they are relatively unknown to today's astronomers. For longest focal length eyepieces, the GSO ED + PBI worked best across the field and eliminated field truncation best. However, central sharpness was again best in the Orion Barlow. The gentler lens curves of the long Barlow seem less demanding on eyepieces even when a PBI was added to the GSO ED. None of the combinations resulted in terribly finicky exit pupil issues. The GSO ED, though, seemed to introduce more than the Orion, even with the PBI in place.

For improved edge of field performance at higher magnification and reasonable weight, you might try to pair the 40mm Pentax XW-R at 667g with a 46.2mm field stop and the 30mm APM UFF at 548g with a 36.4mm field stop.

Most houses down long driveways in the US have mailboxes at the street/road with the address on them: Even in the city, this is fairly common: Ever thought about putting your mailbox out at the street/road?

We get our USPS deliveries to a common mailbox area at the back of our neighborhood. Our postal workers are always misdelivering things to us. Our local post office gets 2 out of 5 stars on yelp because of it. I try to get deliveries done by anyone else when possible. As an example of their incompetence, I had over $1000 worth of jewelry supplies (another hobby of mine) delivered, but not to me. I was having a panic attack over it. None of my neighbors had seen it, so I waited for the postman to reappear the next day and made him check the neighbors' boxes with me. Sure enough, it was delivered to the neighbor one street over with the same house number, and they hadn't yet picked up the day before's mail. The postman explained they use substitutes around the holidays who are completely clueless, and it was the day after Thanksgiving when it was delivered. Perhaps that's what UPS is doing in your area. Our PO also marks items as delivered just to meet on-time requirements when it fact they have not been delivered. In reality, they show up anywhere from 1 day later to never. However, you can't claim a lost package when the PO says it's been delivered. You can start a package trace, but that never turns up anything when they're trying to cover their lying behinds. By comparison, UPS, Fedex, and Amazon are generally 100% accurate with their deliveries in our area; so I'm very surprised by your experience.

Maybe you asked about 30mm eyepieces on here before ordering, but I don't recall that you did. Had you inquired, I would have recommended the 30mm APM UFF over the 30mm Pentax XW. The UFF is lighter (548g vs 740g) so no balance issues, smaller in diameter, sharper to the edge as far as both astigmatism and chromatic smearing, completely flat of field, lower in distortion, and lower in cost. The only downside is no adjustable eye cup, which I haven't read of anyone complaining about. Here's an excellent comparison of the edge correction of each. I've linked the images below: 30mm Pentax XW: 30mm APM Ultra Flat Field:

Agreed, it looks much bigger on the horizon than it does high up in the sky (at least from here in Texas) later in the season.