[mental4astro (Alexander)]

Hi hszsky,

The Plossl eyepiece design was the bees knees of EPs 30 years ago. It offered better correction and reduced aberrations over other designs.

However, the plossl EPs made cheaply today all fall down with narrower fields of view and reduced eyerelief compared with more contenparary designs that also use superior glass materials and coatings. Eyerelief in particular is poor as the focal length of these plossls is shortened, with you needing to place your eyeball onto the eyelens, and you also need to look into a pinhole to see the image.

Plossls are a good way to start out with a new scope, but only if they come with the instrument. If you are going to start looking to cultivate a better eyepiece collection, or just increase the number of EPs you have, I suggest you look at other designs.

Note, I in no way advocate the need to spend big bucks on eyepieces. With a little research you can find some real gems within the modest end of $ for EPs! The TMB Planetary Type II is such an example. You can get these from eBay for around $60. They are a larger eyepiece than your 25mm plossl, and ALL of them have a larger eyelens than any of the plossls you mention, and the eyerelief with ALL of them is as good as the 25mm Plossl. They are smaller than more expensive eyepieces though, and have fewer and smaller elements, and the multicoating on the lenses is still excellent. I compared my 9mm TMB to a mate's 8mm Vixen LVW (a $300 eyepiece), and the image quality was superior in my $60 TMB, with an as comfortable observing quality. I actually saw MORE stars in my TMB than in my friends still impressive LVW.

Please consider a better alternative to the cheap plossls. These plossls do a job, but there are better eyepieces out there for only a few dollars more. The difference in performance is a quantum leap over these plossls.

Mental.