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What's the worst eyepiece you've ever used?


Mr Moff

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How about a 1/2" Ramsden

or the 4mm pinhole that came with the tascos

and a 1" Erfle or awful as it was known (but to be fair we thought it had been "cleaned")

those were the days

2 milk bottle bottoms and we were grateful for them :tongue:

Be thankful of today's suppliers in the main

Steve

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I've got a 50mm Erfle in a box somewhere, I couldn't get it to focus with any scope I own.

Damn... I bet that must be a beast!!

Hyperion 5mm for me. The views were a bit too 'smooth' for my liking, also, the 2" focal length, er, c 21mm I think was useless. Not a bad eyepiece, just don't be fooled by the gimmicky bits of it. Sold it for double what I paid though, so that was good.

Other than that, don't think I had a really bad eyepiece. A 4mm 0.9 Huygens maybe? Don't know, was so long ago now! I did enjoy the 3.6mm MA Skywatcher did, it wasn't as bad as some suggest, but compared to an 8 or 6 mm Planetary, bye-bye!!

A 9mm kellner used to do me for planetary viewing, but against a plossl there was no match. Really hard to say if these are bad eyepieces though. Each had their own specialist area.

i'll go with hyperion, for disappointment factor.

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still have a soft spot for the 4.8mm T1 Nagler as it was the first Nagler I ever owned. ...............

It's interesting that Roland Christen of Astro Physics fame still uses a 4.8mm Nagler to do critical testing of his companies apochromatic refractors.

Thanks John. To be fair to the Nagler 4.8mm T1, it's sharp to the edge and had good light throughput, but it first came on to the market 30 years ago and eyepiece design has moved on massively since then, mostly thanks to the innovations of Al and TeleVue. My criticism of the 4.8mm related solely to the eye relief which I maintain would be unacceptable to the majority of todays consumers and for me personally meant that I could never actually see the edge of the 82 degree field without removing the eyecup (and even then, it was a stretch!) and I was forever cleaning eyelash grease off the glass.

I read that quote from Roland Christen many years ago so it's interesting he still uses the 4.8mm. I wonder though whether nowadays he doesn't have 3.7 & 4.7mm Ethos's lurking in the background somewhere?

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Hello Danny,

to me the worst eyepiece ever was the 0,96" SR eyepiece supplied with my 114/900mm Newt back in 1975.

Eye relief was short, field of view norrow and there was colour aberration.

But on the other hand it gave me nice views of Jupiter at 180x, when seeing was really good.

Most of the time I took the 10mm SR (90x) wich was not much better the the 5mm SR.

The next-worse eyepiece was a 30mm Plössl. The eyepiece body was thin like the 1,25" barrel

and so the lenses were much smaller than in an 32mm Plössl. Field of view was narrow and

it was very nervous.

One of the biggest disappointments was the 21mm Russian WW wich I bought from APM telescopes.

I asked if it eould be sharp to the edge with my 8"f/6 Dob. But it was very unsharp at the edge,

there was huge astigmatism. I sold it to a friend who was happy with it and his f/13 refractor.

Cheers, Karsten

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Interesting eyepiece Rik.

TAL scopes are made in Siberia of course and I seem to recall they were marketed under the Siberia name in the USA for a while before the TAL brand name was established. Maybe there is a link ?

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Interesting eyepiece Rik.

TAL scopes are made in Siberia of course and I seem to recall they were marketed under the Siberia name in the USA for a while before the TAL brand name was established. Maybe there is a link ?

Sounds right. I remember reading reports that some TAL scopes had odd focus positions. It could be that they were made to fit this kind of EP.

BTW, I expect an SCT would come to focus with it. They have a HUGE focusing range.

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It is 2". It actually belongs to my brother in law. He has a 16" Dob ( currently out of action) so I have all his eyepieces until he gets it rebuilt and the mirrors recoated. I have had them a few years now so he seems in no rush to finish it. It is something like 1800mm FL or there abouts.

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My first scope was the 70mm Bresser that Lidl was selling a few years back. The 4mm Kellner that came with it was the utter pits.

But I was impressed with the scope overall, it performed well with some GSO eyepieces I invested in, and was astonishing value for money. I eventually traded it for some building work - the builder´s young son was interested in astronomy, so it went in a good cause, but I have regretted letting it go ever since.

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