Louis D

Astronomics has 10mm UWAs on order in their Astro-Tech house brand, so it is available from the manufacturer.  Perhaps someone on your side of the pond will order some in the near future.

On 19/05/2022 at 14:01, StarryEyed said:

I never had much luck with filters but hoods or clothes than can block stray light when at the eyepiece and allow your eyes to get better dark adapted have always improved things for me. So an over sized hoody or just an old t-shirt can work wonders not to mention its a cheap fix. 

Only an option for me in the short winter season here.  Putting any covering over my head from April to October leads to profuse sweating even at night for me here.  From June to September, I run a box fan across me to help keep me from sweating at night.  That, and it keeps the mosquitos at bay.

High end camera lenses have had advanced multicoatings since the mid-70s to mid-80s, depending on the manufacturer.  I'm sure similar coatings were applied to high end microscope eyepieces and objectives around the same time.  High end binoculars and spotting scopes soon followed.

It took a while longer for these coatings to migrate to entry level camera lenses and even longer for eyepieces not made by the leading optical houses.  Many entry level binoculars and spotting scopes are still singly coated.  Some eyepieces packaged with department store grade telescopes aren't coated at all.

I'm guessing that when Tele Vue started making eyepieces in the 80s, they did not have access to cutting edge coatings that were only available for internal production by the leading optical houses.  Throughout much of the 1990s, many Chinese eyepieces were only singly coated for similar reasons.  I'm further guessing that Taiwanese and then Chinese optical houses advanced their internal coating technology through the late 1990s and early 2000s and later.  As such, it's always a good idea to inquire about the age of eyepieces not made by Pentax, Vixen, Olympus, Nikon, Zeiss, and Leica who have all been using very good coatings for 25+ years.  I don't know much about Takahashi eyepieces and how their coatings have changed over the past 40 years.  Meade and Celestron eyepieces were in a similar situation to Tele Vue.  Their coatings were dependent on whatever their contracted manufacturers had available at the time.

21 minutes ago, Don Pensack said:

If I'd saved every eyepiece I've ever owned, you'd need to shoot the portrait in Panorama Mode. (over 350 at this point).

I just unloaded 10 of them, so I'm down to only 12.  How long that will be the case, I have no clue.

I'd like to have seen that; although I'll agree holding onto 350 eyepieces at one time would be excessive even by my hoarding standards.  I do have well over 400 CDs boxed up in the house, though; so I just might have kept all 350 eyepieces were I in your shoes. 🤔 If I'd had the discretionary spending power I have today 20 years ago, I just might have ended up with such a collection.

Related to panoramas, remember the old Globuscope and Spin Shot film cameras for panoramas that were spring driven?  How far photo technology has advanced in 40 years is amazing.  Just about every smartphone can take really good panoramas now.

Phase coatings are a necessary evil of roof prisms to realign the slight phase shift experienced by the light passing through it.  Porro prisms do not experience this phenomena and neither do right angle prisms.  I'm not sure that Amici prisms would experience the same effect as a roof prism since the light paths are vastly different:

Amici Prism:

An Amici prism is just a right angle prism with one extra 90 degree reflection on the hypotenuse.

10 hours ago, F15Rules said:

I wonder how many of us will have that epitaph inscribed on our headstones!!🤦‍♀️🥴😅

Dave

Definitely not me.  My kids accuse me and the wife of being hoarders.  I've still got 20+ year old digital cameras that are so obsolete I can't even read their memory cards anymore or get their batteries to charge, and yet I haven't chucked them for unknown psychological reasons.  I even boxed up my 200 and 300 CD changers and put them away just in case I ever want to go back to playing CDs instead of MP3s.  What is wrong with me? 🤪

On the plus side, my grown son has eyes on my old 1980s turntable to play his, and my, vinyl records.  It still works great and wasn't cheap to buy back in the day.

Here's proof of my eyepiece hoarding:

I did pass along the BST/Paradigm and HD-60 sets to my grown daughter now that she and her husband bought a house in a semi-rural area.  She also got some of the lower end 2" eyepieces for widest true field of view use and a couple of the reticle eyepieces for the 60mm RACI finder scope I loaned her.  I hadn't used that finder scope in 20 years, and yet I held onto it.  Now I know why. 😁

Here in Texas, I have to deal with smoke particles from wildfires to the west and northwest and agricultural fires to the south and southwest.  If the sky is hazy, there is an air quality alert, or I can smell smoke in the air, I simply don't take my gear outside at all to avoid gunking up the optics.

I use both a 9mm Morpheus and 10mm Delos, and both are great all around performers with long eye relief.  My 7mm XW is nice, but sometimes displays a bit of chromatism at the edge on bright objects.  All have wonderful contrast from excellent stray light control.  Sorry I can't be of much help on the XWAs since my astigmatism precludes using them without eyeglasses; and with eyeglasses, they're narrower than the XW, Morpheus, and Delos.

My BV eyepieces live in a different case from my A-team monovision eyepieces, so I never use the two at the same time.  If I setup for BV usage, I don't get out the monovision case and vice-versa.  My point is, you're unlikely to use the Vixens in monovision viewing as you grow in the hobby, so don't worry about overlap with wider field eyepieces used strictly for monovision.

22 minutes ago, Chriske said:

It's diffraction is spread evenly all over the field of view, invisible of course.

Not completely invisible.  The diffuse diffraction adds a bit of glow to the entire field, lowering contrast a bit.  I can't recall any reports of side-by-side testing of otherwise identical scopes except for spider type on low contrast objects to actually quantify the difference, however.

2 hours ago, Mandopicker101 said:

Focus and the setup stops quivering quickly. So far so good…

I ought to have sprung for the steel tripod though…

Try putting vibration suppression pads under each tripod foot to settle the vibrations more quickly if needed.

Be careful to avoid over tightening the clamp on the lower leg section.  One used tripod similar to yours I looked at had split the ring around the tube to where it wouldn't tighten at all, so the legs had to be used all the way retracted.

1 hour ago, AstroMuni said:

Latter. Rings & bar remain attached to scope

The bar also makes for a nice handle to lift the scope out of storage if it is stored in a tightly fitted, foam lined case.

3 hours ago, Mr Spock said:

LVWs are looking much happier now a 5mm has been added 

Now you need to swap out the 5mm SLV for a rare 7mm LV since you've got two 5mm eyepieces in there.

On 15/05/2022 at 13:51, Mandopicker101 said:

The original EQ mount and tripod are shot but the tube is good. The mounting rings are a little odd in that they don’t attach to a dovetail plate but screw direct to the mount.

8 hours ago, AstroMuni said:

@Louis DThe OP has said the rings screw into the OTA, so assuming its different

Nope, OP said the rings screw to the mount as highlighted above.

3 hours ago, Mandopicker101 said:

Exactly this. New kit arriving tomorrow or Friday!

Further, OP confirms that's the mount.

@Mandopicker101BTW, make sure to let us know how you get on with all your new kit.  It's good that you're breathing new life into an older scope.

FYI, here's the ad with more images.

@Mandopicker101Correct me if I'm wrong, but does your original scope and mount look like this at the rings?

I can fully understand how some folks can spend hours or even days editing astro images.  I specifically tried to avoid getting sucked down that hole; thus the unpolished look.  I'm not trying to get my image on APOD after all.

It's been a few years, and I've acquired a few more eyepieces, so I updated the SAEP/CAEP image with those new eyepiece views.  The order is a bit scrambled now to fit in the new ones without messing with the existing ordering too much.  Images were taken with the LG G5 for consistency sake despite having the much better LG G6 now.  That, and the two cameras respond slightly differently to CAEP/SAEP despite both being 2mm f/2.4 lenses.  Enjoy!

I took a series of photos roughly every 5 minutes starting from the beginning of the umbral stage to the peak of totality and then went to bed.  I just took images with my cellphone camera held up to a zoom eyepiece in my AT 72ED telescope on an alt-az mount.  It had trouble locking onto both focus and exposure sometimes, so I had to go with what I got.  The images aren't super great, but I was going for the shadow changes rather than sharp details.  I roughly cropped and rotated them (thus the occasional white edges) in Photoshop Elements and then composited them into an animated gif using GIFMaker.  I hope y'all like it.

A lot (but not all) dovetails also have threaded holes at the end to screw in safety capture (?) screws to prevent the dovetail from slipping out completely if the clamp is loosened accidentally.  The problem is, this then requires you to tip your dovetail into the clamp, which many clamps won't open far enough to allow you to do this.  I suppose you could just put one at the upper end and slide it in from the lower end.  This assumes your scope never nosedives while the clamp is loose.

You'll have to report back on how they compare to your existing orthos.  I've read on CN that the Bushnell orthos are quite good.

I get the same dim brownish view in my 9mm LV, and I've always wondered why.  Do you think it's due to the Lanthanum glass element?

I'd assume it's 400mm for a start, and that makes your eyepieces 20mm, 13.3mm, 10mm, and 8mm going from 20x to 50x.  Judging by the sizes of the eye lenses relative to known ortho eyepieces, I'd say those numbers aren't too far off.

The 14mm and 20mm version seem to get universal praise.  However, one person on CN had stray light control issues with his 9mm Orion version and had to resort to blackening and flocking the interior.  Perhaps @FLO could check their version for scatter while viewing the full moon to see if its endemic only to Orion's version rather than all brandings.

Perhaps a variation on the Bushnell Spacemaster II spotting scope eyepieces?

4 hours ago, Mandopicker101 said:

Hello

I’m about to take the plunge and buy an AZ4 tripod and mount for a Celestron Powerseeker 80 OTA. The original EQ mount and tripod are shot but the tube is good. The mounting rings are a little odd in that they don’t attach to a dovetail plate but screw direct to the mount.

I’m thinking I can recycle the rings by screwing them into a dovetail. Will this work and should I opt for a longer plate?

As long as the screws that held it to the mount are 1/4-20 (or possibly M6) sized, you should have no issues.  I recommend a long plate in case you use a 2" diagonal and 2" eyepieces or a 1.25" diagonal and a binoviewer.  That way, you can move the clamp point further back toward the focuser to attain forward-back balance.  If you only use a lightweight 1.25" diagonal with lightweight 1.25" eyepieces, you may not need an overly long dovetail plate.

You'll want socket head cap screws.  The length depends on the distance from the plate to threaded hole of the rings.  Surprisingly, this is not standardized.