Alternatives To $250 Eyepieces

[herbhighstone]

Hello to all the folks --

For the less adventurous among us, Televues and Pentaxes and Naglers are very safe choices, but they're so expensive! Why should your set of eyepieces have to cost more than your telescope? Thus people with scopes of longer focal ratio may be tempted to search for inexpensive eyepieces that will work well with their long-focus instruments. A classic f-15 refractor, for example, really doesn't need a Nagler!

Will I get kicked out of the forums for daring to suggest that every telescope now in use by amateurs is not a f-4.5 Dobsonian reflector? The tyranny of the fast Dob is becoming absolute, and someone in another forum has actually suggested that no eyepiece should be sold today unless it is designed to work well at f/4.5. I say, nuts to that!

The latest Orion catalog has some interesting eyepieces that don't cost very much. The lengthy reign of the Plossl in the low-cost eyepiec world seems to be fading at long last, and I imagine that most people with slow refractors might be very pleased with the non-Plossl, Orion Explorer II eyepieces which are only $29.95.

Now of course people will protest that there are no reviews available for these eyepieces, so they won't dare to buy and try them. Here we seem to be a victim of reviewer snobbery. By this I mean that the reviewers won't be caught dead reviewing an eyepiece that costs less than $150. Are we being well served by this kind of snobbery? Nope! And also we seem to be afraid to trust our own eyes when we select eyepieces.

Orion says that the Explorer II eyepieces have three or four optical elements, which might make them similar to the Edmund RKE's. Despite the dearth of reviews, the RKE's have a very fine reputation, and yes, they are still in the Edmund catalog.

The Orion Epic ED-2 eyepieces feature large eye lenses, so I wonder if they contain a built-in Barlow lens like other barlowed eyepieces that are much, much more expensive. Here once again we're getting away from the cliche Plossl design for inexpensive eyepieces, which to me is a very good thing.

So why not try some eyepieces that cost less than $250 and weigh less than 3 pounds? You might like them ---

Best wishes from Herbert Highstone