Meade LX90 8" maximising FOV

[PatrickO]

I have a Meade LX90 8" SCT mounted on a Celestron 8se mount. I mainly plan to use it for solar system observation and imaging.

I'd also like to do some purely visual DSO observation.

What is the best way to maximise the FOV to observe some of the larger DSOs.

I realise I'm not going to get M31 into the FOV, but wondering if I could get wide enough for Pleiades.

I'm thinking 2" back and diagonal with wide field eyepiece?

[Louis D]

2 hours ago, PatrickO said:

I'm thinking 2" back and diagonal with wide field eyepiece?

That, with a 40mm Pentax XW, 40mm ES-68,  or 41mm Panoptic would probably work best.  Heck, at f/10, you could get away with less well corrected ~40mm eyepieces or even a 56mm Plossl.

Alternatively, you could get a 0.63x focal reducer to use a 32mm Plossl for maximum field of view.  The problem with these is that you would want to remove them for high power viewing because they add spherical aberration that is only visible at high powers.