Tony, four other things for you to consider.
1. Weight. eyepieces of radically different weight many force you to rebalance your scope. Rebalancing can be avoided if they're all roughly similar weight - even if this means the smaller ones are mostly lumps of metal.
2. Eye relief. One particular aspect that annoys me is eyepieces with short eye relief. 20mm is very comfortable and IMHO about perfect, but ultrawides tend to have much shorter eye relief as a consequence of the ultra wide view.
Many of the older designs like orthoscopic, Plossls and RKE's have lots of eye relief for the longer eyepieces (20m and up) but none at the short end. For example, at 8mm you will have to screw your eyeball into contact with the eyelens to get the full field of view.
This is one aspect that Vixen, Televue and Explore Scientific have all covered quite well and you can find the specs for their eyepieces online.
3. Parfocal. When changing eyepieces its a big help if they all have the focal plane at the same spot to minimise refocussing (this is what par focal means). Eyepieces from different manfacturers won't be parfocal.
4. 2" vs 1.25" barrels. I hate swapping adapters to switche between 2"/1.25 barrels.
One reason I chose the Vixen LVW set is that they were one of the few series, if not the only series, that are all about the same weight from 3.5 to 42mm focal length, and have dual barrels (1.25/2") or 2" only (the 42mm) so no adapter required, and all have 20mm eye relief or more.
OTOH there are many who assemble a "bast*rd set" mix of various types if that suits them.
|