Orthoscopics?

[jetstream]

Mak, you will like the 12.5mm Hutech EP I think- they use the same glass/coatings as Tak , Fujiyama, UO etc rumor has it. Congrats for the fine purchase!

[Mak the Night]

3 minutes ago, faulksy said:

no, stopped a few years ago after the great sounarmy in japan

Oh right, yeah, I think I read that somewhere. From what I can gather orthoscopics were the high magnification eyepieces before Plossls became so fashionable.

[Mak the Night]

5 minutes ago, jetstream said:

Mak, you will like the 12.5mm Hutech EP I think- they use the same glass/coatings as Tak , Fujiyama, UO etc rumor has it. Congrats for the fine purchase!

Thanks, I'm looking forward to testing it. If I really get on with it I very might very well get a second to make a bino pair. I nearly bought a pair of Pentax XF's but they have the old style barrel undercuts which don't play well with my William Optics bino. WO & TV have the new tapered ones which are fine. The Hutech barrels are smoothies. The Hutech 18mm looks good as well.

[John]

23 minutes ago, Mak the Night said:

Do they still make the BGO's?

No, but the Fujiyama, Astro Hutech and new University Optics HD orthos are just as good in performance terms and look and feel very, very similar in terms of finish to the Baader GO's. They might have come from the same factory if we had not been told that production there had ceased. I reckon the machining capabilities, patterns etc were moved to a different production facility.

 

 

[Mak the Night]

1 minute ago, John said:

No, but the Fujiyama, Astro Hutech and new University Optics HD orthos are just as good in performance terms and look and feel very, very similar in terms of finish to the Baader GO's. They might have come from the same factory if we had not been told that production there had ceased. I reckon the machining capabilities, patterns etc were moved to a different production facility.

 

 

OK thanks. I'm looking forward to trying this Hutech 12.5mm now. When the weather breaks of course. So, just in time for the Mars opposition then? lol

[jetstream]

One more comment Mak, if I were to buy another ortho it would not be a Tak, simply because they are substantially more money for the same performance as your Hutech. BTW my 12.5mm gave me a hint of H1 in the Trap... and easily split Sirius in the 15"... and then there's Jupiters rich band color in it...

 

Eagerly waiting your report!

[Mak the Night]

29 minutes ago, jetstream said:

One more comment Mak, if I were to buy another ortho it would not be a Tak, simply because they are substantially more money for the same performance as your Hutech. BTW my 12.5mm gave me a hint of H1 in the Trap... and easily split Sirius in the 15"... and then there's Jupiters rich band color in it...

 

Eagerly waiting your report!

Yeah, the Hutech are a competitive price, actually a bit cheaper than the TeleVue 11mm Plossl. I'm so looking forward to getting a butcher's hook at Jupiter with it, especially combined with a Baader Neodymium contrast filter. The Baader filter really brought out the Great Red Spot the last time I viewed Jupiter.

[cdd2455]

One quality I noticed is comfort, the pair of 32mm Tak Orthos I use for H-Alpha in a Denk Standard with Power x Switch are so easy and comfortable to use.

Best Regards

Carl  

[Mak the Night]

7 hours ago, cdd2455 said:

One quality I noticed is comfort, the pair of 32mm Tak Orthos I use for H-Alpha in a Denk Standard with Power x Switch are so easy and comfortable to use.

Best Regards

Carl  

Thanks, that interesting. I guess the 32mm are quite comfortable to use, they certainly look it. 

[F15Rules]

On 25 January 2016 at 00:09, Mak the Night said:

Thanks, I'm looking forward to testing it. If I really get on with it I very might very well get a second to make a bino pair. I nearly bought a pair of Pentax XF's but they have the old style barrel undercuts which don't play well with my William Optics bino. WO & TV have the new tapered ones which are fine. The Hutech barrels are smoothies. The Hutech 18mm looks good as well.

Mak, your Hutech 12.5mm will pair up nicely for binoviewing.

I have a pair of CJZ 10mm orthos which I routinely use in my maxbrights. I have winged eyeguards for them and they are superb. The contrast is as good as anything I have ever used. The fov is only about 42 degrees, like most true orthos, but as you are using them to study fine detail on luna, planets, double stars etc you don't get distracted by wider fields.

I also have Antares HD orthos (same as BGO, even the lettering is green too!) at 7mm, 9mm and 12.5mm and they are wonderful eps. I'd love to find another of any of them to binoview with. They fit into the eyepiece holder with a lovely "plop" as they push the air out ahead of them, so fine is the engineering. Great eyepieces.

The beauty of orthos is their simplicity. Just 3 elements, highly polished, great coatings and just super views. I'm not at all anti wide field, I have ES 68s and an UWA 14mm 84 degree which I love too. But for close up, intenisive high power work you can't beat a good ortho in my opinion.

The Baader Classics are worth a mention too, very good optically, not so good as BGOs build wise, but great value. I noticed Microglobe offering the 10mm BCO for just £38 new - a bino pair for under £80?? Wow!

Dave

 

[Mak the Night]

1 hour ago, F15Rules said:

Mak, your Hutech 12.5mm will pair up nicely for binoviewing.

I have a pair of CJZ 10mm orthos which I routinely use in my maxbrights. I have winged eyeguards for them and they are superb. The contrast is as good as anything I have ever used. The fov is only about 42 degrees, like most true orthos, but as you are using them to study fine detail on luna, planets, double stars etc you don't get distracted by wider fields.

I also have Antares HD orthos (same as BGO, even the lettering is green too!) at 7mm, 9mm and 12.5mm and they are wonderful eps. I'd love to find another of any of them to binoview with. They fit into the eyepiece holder with a lovely "plop" as they push the air out ahead of them, so fine is the engineering. Great eyepieces.

The beauty of orthos is their simplicity. Just 3 elements, highly polished, great coatings and just super views. I'm not at all anti wide field, I have ES 68s and an UWA 14mm 84 degree which I love too. But for close up, intenisive high power work you can't beat a good ortho in my opinion.

The Baader Classics are worth a mention too, very good optically, not so good as BGOs build wise, but great value. I noticed Microglobe offering the 10mm BCO for just £38 new - a bino pair for under £80?? Wow!

Dave

 

Yes, I've had a session with the 12.5mm ortho's and I was very impressed. Your Carl Zeiss Jena ortho’s sound really nice, I've read a bit about some of the CZJs. 

Have the Antares HD ortho's been discontinued? They also sound good. I thought the limited FOV would be a problem but it wasn't when I had a session with them last night. Although at higher magnifications objects do move quite rapidly out of frame lol.

I looked at the Baader Classics, I believe they've got a slightly improved FOV over the usual ortho's. 

[F15Rules]

Yes, the Antares HD's are no longer available and I don't believe were big sellers. The older red lettering versions are, I think, a bit more common, but are not as good coatings wise.

The BCOs have a 50 degree field simply by having a differently positioned field stop which is not so sharp. The trade off is that the outermost portion of the fov is a little soft (5-10%) versus the rest, whereas the traditional orthos are pin sharp to the edge of their (40-43 degree) field. John I think referenced this in his review of the BCO range for FLO a while back. But on axis they are pin sharp. My personal favourite is the 10mm and I'd rather barlow this to 5mm than use a 6mm with pretty short eyerelief.

HTH

 

Dave

[John]

1 hour ago, F15Rules said:

 

The beauty of orthos is their simplicity. Just 3 elements, highly polished, great coatings and just super views....

 

Not disagreeing with the performance assessment Dave but being pedantic it's 4 elements in 2 groups (singlet + cemented triplet) for an abbe ortho isn't it ?

The TMB Supermono's were 3 elements in a single cemented group. Just 2 air-glass surfaces with those but just a 32 degree AFoV.

@ Mak: the Baader Classic orthos do offer a 50 degree AFoV although the last 5 degrees (approx) is not quite as well corrected as the central part of the field but was put there by Baader to help find and frame objects.

Edit: I see Dave got there 1st on that last part !

 

[F15Rules]

1 hour ago, John said:

Not disagreeing with the performance assessment Dave but being pedantic it's 4 elements in 2 groups (singlet + cemented triplet) for an abbe ortho isn't it ?

The TMB Supermono's were 3 elements in a single cemented group. Just 2 air-glass surfaces with those but just a 32 degree AFoV.

@ Mak: the Baader Classic orthos do offer a 50 degree AFoV although the last 5 degrees (approx) is not quite as well corrected as the central part of the field but was put there by Baader to help find and frame objects.

Edit: I see Dave got there 1st on that last part !

 

Sorry John, I was having a senior moment and thinking of Kellners, not orthos (have used some very nice Kellners btw - they do seem to have good transmission on faint objects, I remember using some TS 2" Reverse Kellners (RKE's) and the 32mm in particular had great contrast and did seem to show more very faint stars on good nights.

Thanks for the correction :-)

Dave

[jetstream]

I love hearing honest assessments of peoples eyepieces and even when results vary a bit. It is interesting to do a distortion test on the orthos as well as on the other EP's we own, sometimes "ortho perfect" isn't quite perfect lol! The field stops on my Baader Classic,18mm & 10mm are sharp, as sharp as the Tak and KK's are.

One thing I'm doing is scrutinizing my eyepieces for on axis sharpness which does vary quite a lot... how and why can on axis sharpness differences exist? I've asked many knowledgeable people about this....

Anyway, my latest pursuit in the quest for enlightenment is the study of MTF and how much this applies to on axis sharpness- this not only applies to the eyepiece but to the optical train itself, but I have noticed that extremely sharp EP's are sharp in any of my scopes.

Any thoughts or comments on this on axis phenomena and MTF are welcome...

BTW the 12.5mm Tak (Hutech etc) makes the short list....

[alan potts]

I have to say with the planets being out of the way for so long my orthos have not had much scope time, still that is slowly changing, I will have to try the 18mm in my Dob and see if I can track anything, maybe starting with the Moon.

[Mak the Night]

2 hours ago, F15Rules said:

Yes, the Antares HD's are no longer available and I don't believe were big sellers. The older red lettering versions are, I think, a bit more common, but are not as good coatings wise.

The BCOs have a 50 degree field simply by having a differently positioned field stop which is not so sharp. The trade off is that the outermost portion of the fov is a little soft (5-10%) versus the rest, whereas the traditional orthos are pin sharp to the edge of their (40-43 degree) field. John I think referenced this in his review of the BCO range for FLO a while back. But on axis they are pin sharp. My personal favourite is the 10mm and I'd rather barlow this to 5mm than use a 6mm with pretty short eyerelief.

HTH

 

Dave

Yes, I'm a firm believer in using a Barlow to halve (or more) an eyepiece f/l rather than trying to squint into a little eye lens with a tiny field stop, which can be very tiring on the eyes.

[Mak the Night]

I had first light with my newly acquired 18mm Astro Hutech orthoscopic eyepiece for a very brief time on M42 at around 72x magnification until the clouds quickly put a stop to that. It was not until later that it was clear enough to see the Jupiter-Moon conjuction well at a few minutes after the lunar transit (03:20 GMT, Virgo) at around a 39° elevation. The seeing was above average and my first views of the Moon at 72x were bright and clear with the Terminator in the east displaying some very detailed crater shadows with little atmospheric boiling. At 144x (utilising a 2x Barlow) the view was still good and I was impressed with the sharpness, brightness and overall contrast of the 18mm orthoscopic. 

18mm Astro Hutech orthoscopic

A quick comparison with a 20mm TeleVue Plossl showed that they gave quite similar bright, clear views although, to me, the Astro Hutech view appeared very slightly ‘cooler’ and with what seemed slightly more contrast. The difference in FOV was obvious as the orthoscopic has 42° compared to the 50° of the Plossl. The eye relief at 15.2mm was slightly better with the orthoscopic compared to the TeleVue’s 14mm and the field stop of the Plossl at 17.1mm is 4.6mm greater than the 18mm Astro Hutech’s. The eye lens of the TeleVue is larger than the 15mm one of the Astro Hutech. Both are pleasant and easy eyepieces to use and are similar in weight and overall feel although the AH orthoscopics possess no rubber eye guards (which I rarely use above a 25mm f/l anyway). 

To be honest though, there was hardly anything between them and I was using a Baader Neodymium filter threaded into the diagonal nosepiece with both. The bino pair of 12.5mm orthoscopics gave me a choice of 104x, 166x and 208x magnifications depending on what nosepiece Barlow is deployed, and after some experimentation, I settled on 166x for most of the session. The three dimensional view was quite spectacular and with a 10.4mm eye relief (probably longer with the 1.6x Barlow) was quite acceptable. The 12.5mm AH feels much more comfortable to use than its nearest TeleVue size equivalent of 11mm. I believe TeleVue once did produce a 13mm Plossl but as they don’t now I went with the AH ortho’s. Another plus is that as the Astro Hutech EP’s are ‘smoothies’ (no barrel safety undercuts) they didn’t create any extraction problems with the bino compression rings and sat beautifully in the William Optics binoviewer almost as if they were designed for it. William Optics and TeleVue EP’s with their respective newer tapered undercuts are fine, but anything with the old style undercut can sometimes create problems on extraction because of compression ring snagging.

I was particularly impressed by the bino views near the lunar terminator, the Hercules and Atlas craters really stood out and Hercules G was very noticeably visible. I switched my attention to Jupiter (41° elevation, Leo) and was rewarded with a relatively decent view of the cloud bands. Unfortunately the GRS had moved on out of view by then but the colour contrast between the brown equatorial bands was distinctly noticeable, with the upper band appearing a warmer, richer brown compared to the lower one. The ortho’s definitely showed a defined view as it tracked right across the entire frame with no noticeable distortions (apart from Jupiter’s occasional ’boiling‘ of course lol). Europa, Io and Ganymede were easily discernible strung out in a line with Io appearing the nearest to Jupiter on the eastern side. I switched between Jupiter and the Moon for a while before ending the bino session with a last look at both targets using the 18mm orthoscopic in ‘cyclops mode’ again at 144x.  

Hercules G (VMA)

The Astro Hutech orthoscopics are well made and pleasant eyepieces to use giving superb viewing. I’m guessing they’ll be used quite a bit by me, especially the 12.5mm bino pair. Any concerns I had about the smaller 42° FOV were quickly dispelled by the overall quality, ergonomics and ease of use of the eyepieces as a whole.

 

 

[John]

Nice report Mak

For the past months I've not actually had an orthoscopic in my eyepiece case or on loan for review. Seems strange really after a decade or so of having at least a few around

 

 

[Mak the Night]

4 minutes ago, John said:

Nice report Mak

For the past months I've not actually had an orthoscopic in my eyepiece case or on loan for review. Seems strange really after a decade or so of having at least a few around

 

 

Thanks. To be honest, ortho's are new to me. I'd read a fair bit about them, mainly as they are often nostalgically discussed on forums by many. I originally wanted a pair of 12 or 13mm eyepieces for the bino and it basically came down to making a choice between the 11mm or 15mm TV's (as I already had one of each) and the 12.5mm Celestron Omni Plossl I have, which I really quite like, has an older barrel undercut. I nearly bought a pair of Pentax XF's (before they were on sale) 

http://www.firstlightoptics.com/clearance/PentaxXF12.html

but they have the same undercuts, and are also a little long or heavy for what I wanted. I've not read any decent reviews about the XF's either yet the Astro Hutech EP's seem to be very highly recommended. Overall, I'm rather impressed with the AH ortho's and glad I bought them. Getting to use them for first light on the Moon-Jupiter conjunction was an added bonus and ensured my status as a pretty happy bunny! lol 

[Stu]

Very nice eyepieces. At the moment, they form a significant part of my eyepiece collection as I'm in minimalist mode ?. Nice and light so they reduce balance issues on manual alt az mounts whilst still being excellent optically

[Mak the Night]

12 minutes ago, Stu said:

Very nice eyepieces. At the moment, they form a significant part of my eyepiece collection as I'm in minimalist mode ?. Nice and light so they reduce balance issues on manual alt az mounts whilst still being excellent optically

Yes, the weight factor was an important factor in my decision to get ortho's, especially for the bino.

[Mak the Night]

And they had to fit in my bino case!

[Dude_with_the_tube]

I use orthos all the time for planetary observations and as such FOV is not that important,also scope is driven what makes it even more irrelevant.For critical observations,there is nothing what can beat the old good ortho

Below 12.5mm eye relief is tight,but orthos barlow excellently,as such,if you are struggling with eye relief,who stops you from using a good quality barlow?

But where i found orthoscopics really excell,is the binoviewers! A pair of them are truly superb.They are small,what means you will not have issues with your eye placing or getting your nose betweem the Ep`s.Views are outstanding,crips,sharp.

Have tried Circle T`s,very nice. BGO`s same,but didnt like them in binoviewers due to the flat top and it made them sit against your skin and in cold nights it was not comfortable.Nothing wrong with the new run of University optics and the Fujiyama`s.

Eventually i settled for the Meade Research grade  and love them.These are not going anywhere any time soon  

[Mak the Night]

26 minutes ago, Dude_with_the_tube said:

I use orthos all the time for planetary observations and as such FOV is not that important,also scope is driven what makes it even more irrelevant.For critical observations,there is nothing what can beat the old good ortho

Below 12.5mm eye relief is tight,but orthos barlow excellently,as such,if you are struggling with eye relief,who stops you from using a good quality barlow?

But where i found orthoscopics really excell,is the binoviewers! A pair of them are truly superb.They are small,what means you will not have issues with your eye placing or getting your nose betweem the Ep`s.Views are outstanding,crips,sharp.

Have tried Circle T`s,very nice. BGO`s same,but didnt like them in binoviewers due to the flat top and it made them sit against your skin and in cold nights it was not comfortable.Nothing wrong with the new run of University optics and the Fujiyama`s.

Eventually i settled for the Meade Research grade  and love them.These are not going anywhere any time soon  

Yes, the AH 12.5mm performed well in my bino's for a variety of reasons. Did the Circle T's have 'volcano' tops?