Barlow reducing visibility?

[SonnyE]

2 hours ago, glowjet said:

"Stack your Barlow's. " Wanting to get that bit closer, reminded me of one Astronomers good wife who told her other half, "if you want things to be a bit larger, then take the scope down to the bottom of the garden and get closer to what you are looking at"

 

It was a fun... experiment, John. And it got us there. But it sure darkened up as we went along.

Now I do all my observation on a computer screen, and do long exposure photography. Very little actual observing with eyepieces.

[MBSteve]

This post is a few days old, but now that my Delos 17.3mm arrived, I thought I'd share my observations.

I set the delos up during daytime to look at a distant tree. It looked similar in quality compared to my GSO Plossls. Did I waste my money on a crazy expensive EP? I had to wait until the next clear night to find out.

The dog woke me up at around 1am and the sky was clear, so out come the delos. Firstly, as I expected, the FOV makes a massive difference and the adjustable eye relief was nice. Happy camper. 

The thing that blew me away was the focusing. With the plossls, I rarely use the fine adjustment knob in my crayford focusser because it doesn't appear to actually help much. With the delos I was able to focus the image perfectly using the fine adjustment knob. Blew my frickin mind how much I'm missing by using stock plossls. I didn't even notice how much it was out of focus before I got the delos. I thought it was just atmospheric interference.

So, now to the bit that is relevant to this post. Based on my observations, the plossls and GSO barlow just does not focus well enough to get a perfectly clear image. To me that means it doesn't focus the light tightly enough onto a single point. Even a little deviation will cause focusing issues.

I placed this delos in the GSO barlow and focussing with rubbish again. Barlow fail.

If any other noobies come across this post, Delos is worth the premium. I'll be replacing my barlow with a Tele Vue one soon.