eyepiece dust devils

[Pete Presland]

hi all

i have a meade 20mm qx wide angle eyepiece that has a lot of dust specks internally i am very tempted to take it apart and clean it,can't be too difficult can it?

anbody out there do this sort of thing?

[brianb]

Be careful, getting the components back in with the right spacers in the right order & the right way round is less easy than it looks. You may also have issues with centering after reassembly.

Small dust specks are unlikely to have much impact on the image, I'd leave it alone unless the dust specks are bigger than "small". In any event they're most likely on the outside surfaces, try blowing them off the objective facing end with a large rubber bulb blower.

[russ]

do indeed be careful. A few years back i decided to take apart a GSO 20mm Superview and all was going well until a spacer dropped out. I had no idea where this spacer had appeared from. Spent an hour trying in vain to reassemble the eyepiece correctly. And then dropped all the bits and jumbled them. Threw the whole lot straight in the bin. Fortunately it only cost £10 on Ebay. Nothing really lost. But what was annoying was the eyepiece worked perfectly in use, the dust bunnies couldn't be seen. So i wrecked a perfectly good eyepiece.

[NGC 1502]

Hi, the dust could be internal, but if they are on the outside surface of the element

towards the scope, then it can look very much like internal dust.

Only you can decide if it's annoying enough to try to clean that element, some

are hard to reach, although I've done it myself quite a few times.

But dismantling is another issue, as Russ has said.....

Good luck, Ed.

[Astro_Baby]

Absolutely be super careful - you will need some jewellers screwdrivers most likely.

If your going to do it take pics of each stage of the disassembly process and take lots of time to make notes about where stuff goes with special reference to the direction of lens elements - ie if its concabve in which direction does it face etc etc.

Personally I'd leave well alone unless the dust bunnies are super bad.

[nigelwr]

If you are very careful it can be done the hard part is getting the courage to start taking it apart!