are these eps any good?

[tenbyfifty]

Can anybody vouch for the quality

of the following 1.25" eps:

skywatcher 'SP - Series' Super-Plossl 6.3 mm

skywatcher Ultrawide Eyepiecs UWA 6mm

Celestron Omni Series Omni 6mm

or a Tal 6mm equivalent around £30.

Does the extra £20 for meade 4000s make that much difference?

I want to buy an ep to go with a meade etx90

to give me a decent view of Saturn but don't want

to spend £50. I would like to go for the skywatcher LERs but there

is no 6mm option.

Hope, you can help.

[GazOC]

I've got a 6mm Ultrawide (Skywatcher clone), you can get them from ScopeStuff for about £25. For the money and condisering the wide FOV thet are pretty good, though I'm not sure about being planetary EPs......theres probably better options that give views as good without the FOV, they are better for deep sky IMO.

[FLO]

Hi Tenbyfifty,

At f14, the ETX90 isn't fussy about eyepieces. I find the ETX 90 works best with eps from 12.4 - 32mm. The 12.4 barlowed would give 200x, though the scope would need to have properly cooled and the seeing be clear and steady for it to work well at such high magnification.

At 200x Saturn would look like this:

[tenbyfifty]

Oh. I thought it would look bigger than that. That's the view I get with the 10mm ep.

Surely I can make it bigger than this?

[The Warthog]

A picture like this tells you why the Orthoscopics, with their narrower FOV, still work well on planets. There's a lot of FOV left over to go around. The narrow FOV might even be an advantage, making the planet look less 'lost' in the view.

[tom.yates]

I agree with WH when observing the planets you don't need the extra field to distract your observations

[FLO]

Surely I can make it bigger than this?

A telescope can support 40-60x magnification per inch of aperture depending on the quality of its optics and atmospheric seeing conditions. Here in the UK, at our latitude, 40-50x per inch is about the going rate.

Increasing magnification further will make the object larger but there will be no increase in resolution/detail.

Hope that helps,

Steve

[Naz]

Also increase beyound the 50X per inch in magnification will make an object fainter.

try it and see, especially on fainter objects.

nabban

[GazOC]

...any magnification makes an object fainter, it's just whether you notice it or not!

[Naz]

Agreed.

nabban

[Keith2]

I like the Skywatcher ultrawides very much - the view seems much better than through an ordinary Plossl.

I'm very lazy in my polar alignment. I just point the mount vaguely in the direction of Polaris, and get on with observing as quickly as possible. So it's nice having an eyepiece that keeps a planet in view as long as possible. And they're gorgeous for big wide fields of stars.

[GazOC]

They are good eyepieces, they do suffer a bit at the edges in my f5 scope but in my refractor and Mak they are sharp right to the edge.

[lunator]

You can get a 2nd hand orthoscopic for £20-£25 and for that kind of money you can't go wrong for planetary viewing.