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Old 15-07-2011, 12:15 AM
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mental4astro (Alexander)
kids+wife+scopes=happyman

mental4astro is offline
 
Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: sydney, australia
Posts: 5,005
Hi Rathalian,

Plossl eyepieces used to be the bees-knees of eyepieces close to thirty years ago. The lens design is still very good, giving plenty of eye relief (how close you need to park your eye to see comfortably into the eyepiece and still see the whole FOV). However, this performance drops of very quickly with the really short focal length EPs. You've noticed this already with the poor 6mm you have. The 25mm you've found to be a comfortable low power EP.

In the last 30 years, eyepiece design has come a long way. Improvements in glass technology has provided for incredible designs that give fantastic wide FOVs, and extraordinarly long eye relief. Best thing though, many of these new eyepieces are also inexpensive.

I'd suggest you look at the two eyepieces here fellow IIS member Sylvain is offering us here on IIS. These 6mm & 9mm TMBs are truely marvelous. I've got both, having bought the 6mm one year before Sylvain's offer, and at what I thought was a bargain price of $110 THEN! Now, you can get both for that.

The eye relief these EPs have is fantastic. They are as easy to use as your 25mm plossl, and have a FOV of 60 degrees. While there are wider FOV eyepieces out there, 60 degrees still offers plenty of 'drift time' through the EP, meaning less shifting of the scope. The quality of the image across the whole field is brilliant too. The quality of the image is fantastic too: the coatings are first rate.

Another thing is that they are also light weight too.

All of this is to say that you don't need to spend big bucks to get good gear.
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