Good afternoon all,
The 6mm Delos arrived this morning. I knew it was coming because clouds engulfed the Illawarra/Shoalhaven Shires in the early hours of this morning
I have to say out of the box I am really impressed with it’s physical looks. Build quality is very good and the eye lens is really wide and immersive. The adjustable eye guard is a dramatic improvement over the “instadjust” system on the Nagler T4’s and the Radians. The adjustable eye guard is all metal and in two halves, it slides up and down and the top part is basically a lock ring which you activate by twisting about a ¼ turn. Very impressive that adjustable eye guard in fact. It is a similar physical size to the 5mm Pentax XW but somewhat heavier than that eyepiece. It is heavy enough that it may cause balance issues in some small dobs with small bearings, that experience balance issues with heavier eyepieces.
Andrew Lockwood (alocky) has kindly agreed to loan me a 6mm Televue Radian and Andy Jackson (anj026) has kindly agreed to loan me a Televue Nagler 3-6mm Zoom, for the purposes of the review. Hopefully throwing the zoom into the review might also allow me to draw some conclusions regarding the 6mm Delos compared to the 5mm Pentax XW. I can then draw parallels through the zoom at 5mm and 6mm and also through using my 5mm and 6mm UO HD orthos.
Over the coming weeks I will use all of the eyepieces on the available solar system targets, which at the moment are really limited to The Moon and Jupiter. I will also use them on a large number of testing DSO's including double/multiple stars, galaxies and planetary nebula. I will be at Coonababrabran next new moon for the 3RF Post Eclipse Star Safari and that will give me a good opportunity to run them through their paces on DSO's.
Stay tuned for some preliminary reports on the 6mm Delos under the stars when the weather clears.
Cheers,
John B