Quote:
Originally Posted by astro744
I had a similar experience with a Tele Vue 35mm Panoptic with 4x Powermate giving me one of the finest views of Jupiter and Saturn I had ever seen. Telescope was 10.1" f6.4 Newtonian with (Suchting) refigured primary. What I liked about the view was the huge eye lens the Panoptic provides and at the higher power the Powermate offers.
What was the telescope you used your combination on, Don? I'm curious what magnification you had.
Note the Powermates are essentially invisible unless you're chasing 15th magnitude Quasars in which case a design with less but highly polished lens elements would be advantageous, (contrast is the key). I like the way the Powermates retain eye relief exactly as the original eyepiece design was intended to have.
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456x in a 12.5" newtonian with Zambuto primary mirror and Antares Optics 1/30 lambda secondary in a contrast-optimized structure. Cooled with 2 large boundary layer fans and one rear fan, collimated with Glatter laser,
Farpoint Cheshire, Catseye autocollimator. PowerMate was 2X 2".
Since then, I've obtained 6mm, 4.7mm, and 3.7mm Ethos eyepieces, so I sold the PowerMate because I no longer needed it to get close to 500x.
Your experience with the 4X PowerMate doesn't surprise me.