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The sky is clear today and to top it, there was this wonderful ISS pass today. It has been awful the past days so I took my 15 year old out after doing chemistry HW (lots of protests!) and asked him (nicely!) to sit in a reclining deck chair with a pair of binos to watch the ISS pass overhead for 5 minutes! **** Apparently I'm the best dad in the world for today! **** I took the image below with a Nikon 7000 + 10mm Fisheye on a iOptron SkyTracker 2. Approx. 5 minutes exposure at ISO 800. I'm osrry about the read streaks. That is me with my red light wondering to/from the camera.

Hey guys, I recently purchased the Orion XT6 and I've been very pleased thus far. I've been using a 25mm eyepiece, and was slightly disappointed. I'm very new and didn't realize all the technical stuff about eyepieces. I'm very much into viewing things like the planets, not as much deep space. (Jupiter and Saturn especially) So, that being said, should I get a 10mm, a x2 Barlow or should I just get something else? I'm really looking forward to seeing your suggestions! (If you have any photos of Jupiter or the planets using one of the eyepieces with no added zoom from the camera, etc that would also be great) cheers, Tom

My old Celestron X-Cel 10mm is OK for the 8SE but perhaps I would want something better in this range for the f9 100ED. Suggestions? I don't want to go mad, maybe up to around £100. I have a 5mm X-Cel LX which ought to be OK, I think. If I can stick to the Celestrons it should maintain some consistency in my collection, are the Luminos's a good choice for this scope? Should they also improve views in my 8SE and 150P?

Tele Vue: Delos 10mm AFOV: 72º FL: 10mm Eye-Relief: 20mm Barrel: 1.25" Weight: 408g Length: more or less between 125mm - 140mm As soon as I looked through the Delos eyepiece, Saturn jumped onto my face. The breath whooshed out from my body and everything froze for a split second, as though the world and the ringed planet had come to some silent agreement and they paused for that tiny span of time of absolute wonderment. It was a fabulous effect, Saturn had been captured perfectly and for the following evenings I searched for that moment time and time again. Saturn was always going to be unbelievable and drew gasps from myself and non-observing girlfriend and even at this lowish magnification many subtle atmospheric bandings were clearly noticeable as were the six faint moons; tiny spheres of dimly sparkling light, beautifully contrasted in the eyepiece’s night of black velvet. Using the Delos as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of the past was turning out to be a joy. Under the stars, under the canopy of dark skies, it is a great eyepiece with which to understand and celebrate what matters to us in this hobby. On anything I decided to view the image was always outstanding, skipping from object to object there were nights when I didn’t need to bring out another eyepiece. Deep space is incredible and the Delos is perfect for detailing the matted starlight and glittering sphere of suns within many globular clusters, especially at this time of year around Hercules, Bootes and Coma Berenices, the dark background and wide-field only enhancing the globulars' brightness. In comparison with the 9mm Baader Genuine Ortho the difference was surprising. In the 10” f/5, the BGO 9mm has been the most used, the most celebrated and revered eyepiece whose outstanding performance on globular clusters, galaxies, planets and the Moon had driven me to buy the 10mm Delos in the first place. Image quality in both eyepieces is as sharp and crisp as it is going to get, yet I found the Delos offering a more neutral, significantly brighter and aesthetically pleasing view. The difference in AFOV and glass is simply staggering. During normal viewing, there came the stage where the Delos just disappeared, no longer peering through a peep hole but out of window on the side of some space craft. Galaxies in Virgo and Coma Berenices were a real telescopic treat, well defined stellar patches of soft light that with concentration often revealed more of their inner secrets. Beginning a tour at M 61, I began galaxy hopping, field of view by field of view along a cosmic stream of galaxies with their dense cores of billions and billions of stars. M 88 took on a faint, spiral affect while the bright M 104 was elongated, punctuated by a soft, stellar core appearing to be - but not clearly separated at this magnification of 125x - at the edge of a dark lane. This week the evenings have had the company of the waxing, waning and full-moon which brightened up the night sky and I figured would make quite a challenging condition for the Delos. Framed adequately within the AFOV, the eyepiece brought out sharp and crisp details across the entire Moon’s surface, giving it a three dimensional quality. As the Moon slowly drifted by it felt as if you were orbiting close above its surface. There was neither aberration nor flare and once out of sight, there was no evidence that the Moon was lurking just outside the FOV – except for the sky being brighter. The quality here was as good as any branded Ortho I’ve looked through. And even though the heart and mind are probably the true lens of stargazing, evening after evening, aberrations on any object was zero as far as I could tell, no curvatures, no astigmatism, nothing. The Delos 10mm is a medium power, wide-field show-piece where objects can slowly drift from one side of the FOV to the other without a hint of distortion or loss of resolution. Every object was just as perfect at the field stop as it was when on axis in the centre; no flare, no scattering of light, no ghosting, no elongation of stars at the edges. Physically, the Delos 10mm is large. It offers a 72º FOV, weighs in at about 408 grams and is about 140mm long when fully extended. Eye-relief is exceptionally comfortable at 20mm and the eye-lens is huge, giving a sense of augmented immersion while observing, especially after being accustomed to 40 to 60 degree eyepieces. As would be expected the Delos’ build quality and attention to detail is exquisite. At an angle in the light, the coatings give off a kind of purplish-burgundy frac like tint and peering into the eyepiece itself reveals complete darkness. The sliding mechanism is a technical wonder which is used to find your own exact eye-relief comfort. It seems to be essentially a metallic sleeve with locking rings incorporated to prevent any slipping but even when loose the eyepiece remains firmly in place until you physically slide it. There’s even an engraved scale to mentally note where you like the eyepiece’s position and if you decide you can lock the rings and everything remains solid. These rings also double as a nice grip when handling the EP, even when wearing gloves. There is something quite pleasant about having engraved green lettering in your eyepiece case, but as with all new technical wonders, it might be necessary to practice a while with the Delos until it becomes the perfect instrument for observation. Although there is certainly no kidney-beaning, at first, at odd moments, I found there was blackout which simply highlighted my own inexperience when dealing with an eyepiece of this type but with practice and careful adjustment of the eye-relief mechanism everything was righted in no time and whether you wear glasses or not, you will more than likely find your own eye-relief position that perfectly tunes itself to your own personal sweet spot for viewing. The Delos 10mm, then, is a majestic wide-field. It has excellent sharpness, outstanding eye-relief and is a beautifully built, high-contrast, ghost-free, flat-field, eyepiece. It is simply a joy to handle and optically superior to anything else I have ever used. However, there is one significant problem with an eyepiece like the Delos. Once used you cannot ever go back to the night before you owned one, because you were a different person then, and like Alice, you’ve gone through a looking glass and have entered a new world of visual wonder, opened up a celestial window onto the universe from which you can never return.