Eyepiece recommendations for 12" F/5?

[greglloyd]

Hi all,

I'm planning to expand my collection of eyepieces for my 300p F/5 over the next lot of months. For medium to high power I will continue to go with the TeleVue Delos as I've been extremely impressed with the 14mm.

It's the longer focal lengths that I have a problem with. The Delos goes to 17.5mm and I'm not planning on getting one of those. I'm looking for something around 25 to 32mm that will perform well enough in the F/5. I would prefer it to be 1.25" barrel size. Main reason for sticking to 1.25" is because I don't want to buy 2" filters - rather I would prefer to use my existing 1.25".

Finally, I would prefer the apparent field size to be 70 deg or more (or at least the high 60's). 25mm focal length may be about the most I can go to as I have slight astigmatism and at 25mm the exit pupil will already be 6.49mm so astigmatism could be more apparent.

Any recommendations for quality longer focal length eyepieces? 

[Stu]

In 1.25", a Televue 24mm Panoptic is about as good as it gets in terms of quality and field of view

[Moonshane]

+1 based on your criteria

[mdstuart]

Or the maxvision 24mm if you are on a budget..

Mark

[russ.will]

Indeed. The Maxvision 24mm (or rather the Meade Series 5000 SWA 24mm it is a clone of) is mentioned in the same breath as the Panoptic in at least one CN review I can think of. It is certainly very sharp, very well corrected in a fast scope and holds it's head up with the Delos in my case. The quid-pro-quo is that it doesn't have anything like the subjective eye relief  - meaning it's actually quite good, but after the 35mm diametre eye lens of the Delos, it feels tighter. 

I keep looking at the Panoptics, but at this focal length I can't justify the expenditure (to myself) on what would seem to be buying one for the sake of owning more green, considering the performance I'm already getting.

[John]

Some good recommendations here.

I make the exit pupil with a 25mm eyepiece in an F/5 scope 5mm rather than 6.49 so it should be fine.

[greglloyd]

Thanks everyone. I'll look into the Max Vision 24mm.

Yes, I think I had the exit pupil wrong as it should have been 5mm. I just copied the value from a telescope optics calculator page where I had been playing with different eyepiece focal lengths. The values must not have updated correctly after I had previously put in a 32mm eyepiece focal length when playing around.