First light with Spacewalker 3D Binoculars

[D4N]

After waiting just a few days for the post delivery cloud to clear up (I guess they can't fit so much cloud in a small binoculars box) I have managed to get an observing session in with these bino's.

As I have also just bought some UHC filters for my Canon 15x50 IS bino's I used these as well as the 3D 8x42 ones.

I hand held both Bino's and alternated between them.

The optics on them seem very good, focus is crisp and I didn't notice any aberrations other than the edges of the array, this was most obvious if a rich star field gets cut in half by it, the stars still look fine but it can be a bit odd that they look further away than the adjacent stars.  They are also pretty light, the twist up eye ups worked well though I didn't try the wings that came with them.

 

My first target was M31 and this came out quite nicely in the 3D array bringing it in front of the background stars.  M31 was pretty close to a tree and I was able to bring that into the field of view at the same time, this seemed to cause a sort of tug of war in my brain where the real parallax of the tree was fighting with the induced parallax of the LOA on the Galaxy.

Next I sought out the coat hanger, this fitted nicely on the central part of the array bringing the asterism in front of the background stars.  I checked Albireo but was unable to split it at 8x magnification, the 15x of the Canon bino's split this easily though (the filters messed up the colours mind).  Next I looked for the dumbbell and was able to find it in both bino's, it was a faint smudge in the 8x but was definately dumbbell-ish in the 15x.

Having found dumbbell easily I decided to swing up to the ring, it was visible but looked like a star at 8x and at 15x was a very small fuzzy.

 

Hercules was next, M13 and M92 showed up clearly as fuzzies in both bino's.

 

Swinging around to Ursa Major M81 and M82 were easy to spot but when I looked for M52 this was only visible in the 15x50's.

 

I had a look at Cassiopeia and was able to see the Pacman nebula in the 15x50 bino's but not the 8x42.  The extra aperture and contrast really brought the nebulosity out.  The owl cluster was clearly visible but too small to see much of it.

 

Looking at the double cluster in Perseus was really rewarding, this really seemed to pop out in the 3D bino's and seemed to be exploding out of Stock 2 just above.  I spent a lot of time looking at these as the effect was astounding.

Melotte 20 around Mirfak was a bit too big to fit on the central part of the array so looked a bit strange.

 

I then spent some time looking at the milkyway from Cynus to Scutum, Wild duck was notable but obviously didn't look anything like a duck at this magnification.

 

A couple of planes passed over and these were quite fun to watch, by putting them off centre in the field of view they appear to fly behind the stars.

Passing clouds were also interesting as the stars would appear to be in front of them.

 

Overall the Spacewalkers are very enjoyable to use, targets that fit into the middle third of the fov are best and if they have plenty of surrounding stars that helps the effect too.  They are a little gimmicky but they are also fun so they make a ice addition to my collection.

The optical array is much less noticeable at night than it is in the day, I imagine this is because the distortions are too obvious when applied to houses.  They did work very well for looking at things in the garden though.

 

Regarding the UHC filters on the 15x50 IS bino's these seemed to work very well, the sky became very dark and the stars were noticeably dimmer as well.  Obviously they make broadband targets like galaxies and clusters significantly dimmer however the increase in contrast evens this out somewhat.  Nebulae are definately clearer with them and it was nice to be able to see NGC281 clearly in bino's.