[iceman (Mike)]

Hi all.

Took my new 7mm Pentax out on Saturday night for some observing, giving it its first light.

The eyepiece is large and fairly heavy, but nowhere near as large or heavy as my 14mm Meade UWA, so there's no extra balance issues that I have to deal with. It comes in a plastic bolt case, and the eyepiece itself is very well constructed, looks and feels great.

I tried it out on a number of targets, including Saturn and Jupiter, Omega Centauri, Centaurus A, Jewelbox cluster and Alpha Crux. It didn't really get much more use than that because the seeing was very ordinary, so most objects didn't handle the extra power (approx 180x) well.

The colour correction of the Pentax feels very natural. The eye relief is huge (20mm), which meant eye placement was a little more critical (than say the 7.5mm Tak LE), but easy enough to get used to. I also haven't played around with the adjustable eyecup yet, so I'm sure that once I position the eyecup to suit my eye placement, it will be just as easy to get the right position.

The images were sharp (as seeing allowed), the 70° FOV was enough and it was very comfortable viewing.

It's a great eyepiece, I'm really happy with it and in the future when I'm looking to fill the gap in my EP collection at the 10mm focal length, I'm quite sure the 10mm Pentax XW will be very high on the list.

Sorry no pictures today, will take some tonight.