Plossyl eyepiece upgrade?

[Cabstarman]

Good evening all,

 

I’m looking for advice regarding to a possible upgrade for my Meade plossyl 4000 series eyepieces. Specifically would a ‘planetary’ eyepiece be wasted on an Etx80 & 90 scope? (The former being an 80mm F5 acromatic refractor & the latter being an F13 90 mm maksutov).

The plossyl eyepieces supplied seem ok but because I have never used anything else I have no means of comparison.

All advice welcome! Thankyou & clear skies.

[RT65CB-SWL]

If you are on a budget, you could try these...
https://www.firstlightoptics.com/bst-starguider-eyepieces.html

or these...
https://www.firstlightoptics.com/vixen-eyepieces/vixen-npl-eyepieces.html

or maybe these...
https://www.firstlightoptics.com/celestron-eyepieces/celestron-x-cel-lx-eyepiece.html

[bomberbaz]

On 26/07/2020 at 21:46, Cabstarman said:

Good evening all,

 

I’m looking for advice regarding to a possible upgrade for my Meade plossyl 4000 series eyepieces. Specifically would a ‘planetary’ eyepiece be wasted on an Etx80 & 90 scope? (The former being an 80mm F5 acromatic refractor & the latter being an F13 90 mm maksutov).

The plossyl eyepieces supplied seem ok but because I have never used anything else I have no means of comparison.

All advice welcome! Thankyou & clear skies.

Hello Cabstarman, few questions below.

What are you wanting to view?

Do you want widefield views?

Do you wear glasses as these can be restrictive?

Do you find your existing eyepieces uncomfortable to use from a certain focal length?

What is your budget per eyepiece or total?

The ETX80 is really not a very good scope for planetary, much better for widefield. So what are your intentions for this one?

The 90 mak is a good scope for planetary. Although aperture will lower resolving of detail. 

Anyway, sorry to throw all those queries at you but when someone asks eyepiece advice unless you are more specific to your personal needs, budget and viewing aims it is hard to give more tailored advice. 

Steve

 

[Kevin Kretsch]

First off, the Meade series 4000 Plossls are actually really good. Yeah, people gripe about where they're made or not made, and wax lyrical about the mythical early Japanese made ones that were polished with magical unicorn fur, but they are all good, some even say better than most other plossls apart maybe from Tele Vue. 

Forget about the ETX-80 for planetary. It's great for wide field star clusters and such but too short a focal length for high magnifications.

The ETX-90 is fine for planetary, due to it's long long focal length (which also means cheaper eyepieces perform better) but small aperture limits detail. Example - shadow transits and Great Red Spot on Jupiter appear as fuzzy darker patches, rather than clean edged circles that we see in good photos. But they are there and always exciting (to me anyway). If you go for a different type of eyepiece, all that won't change much, if at all. Yeah, maybe with nice orthoscopics or more expensive plossls you'll get a little more contrast but that's about all you'll gain.

As an example: With my own ETX-90 I have Meade 4000 plossls in 26mm, 20mm, 15mm with a Meade #126 short tube barlow lens. The 15mm + barlow gives 166X which is too much magnification for most nights because atmospheric seeing rarely allows it. But the 20mm + barlow gives me 125X. Yeah, the image is small but you can count multiple cloud bands on Jupiter, see shadow transits (as a fuzzy dark patch) and the GRS, make out planet and ring shadows on Saturn, you'll get nice views of larger mars details Mars in the coming months coming up to its opposition. Also you'll easily split close double stars down to 2 arcsec, and of course have spectacular views of the moon. I'm happy with that and I have no plans to upgrade those eyepieces for now.