Quote:
Originally Posted by Prickly
Nick, have you tried the WO unit without the screw-in barlow using instead a high quality barlow / powermate with your tak eyepieces. Be interested to hear what the outcome was if you have.
Pity to have to jump up to the higher price bracket viewers but perhaps this is not possible with the lower priced bino viewers.
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David,
I don't have a powermate and the best barlow I have is a Celestron 2X Ultima (1.25"). At one stage I almost upgraded to something better (unfortunately used a Zeiss Abbe barlow to compare), but decided the best barlow was no barlow! Nevertheless, the Celestron is a reasonably good barlow, and I did try it early on when I couldn't get much use from the WO 1.6X OCA ( I don't own an SCT). I managed to get the barlow to work, but the magnification was very high and I estimate it gave me around 4.5X !!! Makes me think to try it again though, but it will have to be with the original WO 20mm eyepiece pairs, otherwise the magnification will be way too high with my other eyepiece pairs.
I purchased the Seibert Multimag, which gives 1.25X, 2X and 3.5X. At the time I thought this was a much better solution, not only because it works in all my telescopes, and has great flexibility, but optically was superior to a barlow in this application, being a true OCS (see Seiberts website for more info). But I will try it again and report back, just to be sure.
And it is a great pity to have to be considering stepping up to something more expensive. I'm starting to think along the lines of Marks comments though, that there are no free lunches, and the extra glass, prisms, beam splitters, get in the way. What I'm unsure of though is to what degree can a really premium BV'er satisfy my needs. Either will have to eventually look through one at a star party or spend the money to answer this question.
On the other astro site that's cloudy, I have continually read how these affordable chinese binoviewers do almost everything, including change your diaper, when you lose control of bodily functions because the views are so marvellous.
Somehow, I don't think so!
For me, the BV'er experience is tantalising, but also frustrating! With time, this may change (I hope).
Cheers
Nick