How Good are Speers Waler Eyepieces?

[Geoff Barnes]

I'm intending to buy one or two very good quality ultra wide angle eyepieces, and without having the funds for Televues I'm looking at more reasonably priced models such as Lunt XWA's, ES N2's, and Speers Walers.

Now the Lunt and ES versions are well documented and have obvious great quality, but there seems less information available on the Speers Walers.

Anyone who has experience with them please let me know what you think of them, they are quite a bit cheaper than the other two.

Many thanks.

[Peter Drew]

I have used only the Speers Waler zoom eyepiece. I was quite impressed with the overall performance, it did show a chromatic extreme field edge when looking at the Moon.  They are long physical eyepieces needing a fair bit of inward focusing and may not suit fast focal ratios.

[Geoff Barnes]

From the APM website... "The eyepieces can be well used on Newtonian telescopes down to f/4.5." 

My 12 inch Dob is f/5 so presumably would be well suited.

[John]

Some are Speers-WALER's are better corrected at F/5 than others. The zooms and the shorter fixed focal lengths are generally good but I found the edge correction worsened with the focal lengths longer than 10mm. 

Getting your head around which version is which is also quite challenging - there have been lots of them over the years !

The ones I've used have tended to need a bit more inwards focusser movement to reach focus than most other eyepieces too, as Peter says.

Personally I'd go for ES 82's / UWAN's / Nirvana's over Speers-WALER's today or the Lunt / ES / Myriad 100's if I was set on 100 degrees and didn't want to invest as much as Tele Vue ask.

 

[Louis D]

The Morpheus line at 76 degrees is pretty close to the AFOV of many of the SW eyepieces, and are far more compact with much better eye relief.