As some of you may be aware Gary Kopff, Andrew Murrell and I are entertaining some visiting American Astronomers, including Dave Kriege from Obsession telescopes, out at Coonabarabran for some dark skies observing.
Dave brought with him an 18"/F4.2 Ultra Compact Obsession and 2 x 13mm Televue Ethos eyepieces. We are awaiting delivery in Coonabarabran of one more piece (QANTAS lost it somewhere) for the 18" UC before we can fully assemble it and give it 1st light. This scope will end up in Melbourne as an additional 3RF scope, after we give it a good shakedown
One of the 13mm ETHOS eyepieces will also remain here with us and has generously been given as a gift by our US visitors to Gary, Andrew and myself, for the hospitality we have extended them. This eyepiece is for the 3 of us to share, which suits us fine as we do a lot of our observing together. All 3 of us used a prototype of this eyepiece in a variety of scopes at 2007 Texas Star Party and loved it. We gave the production model plenty of focuser time in my 18" Obsession on Saturday night. It works beautifully in the 18"/F4.5 Obsession giving 160X and a true FOV of 38', with a 2.9mm exit pupil. It's quite amazing to think you can observe the full moon at over 150X and fit it all easily into the FOV of an eyepiece. This eyepiece is something absolutely special and worth the very high asking price if you own a premium scope.
Cheers
John B