If you could only have one eyepiece for your telescope...

[steve-fung]

Steve-M, Looking back I'm not sure if your question of seeing "a few pics through this thing" was answered. From Craig's response, it seemed you had looked through the Baader Hyperion 8-24 mm Clickstop Zoom Mark III during one of the Urban [email protected] Bush Park (which I have been wanting but never had the chance to go because it is usually during weekdays) and were satisfied except for a few dust specs.

Yes, I do have some pics through this thing, but as you know visual is not the same as astrophotography. Visually, it gives me satisfying views for a zoom lens. For planetary astrophotography and PST solar photography, this is also my goto eyepiece projection setup using the Mark III 8-24 mm zoom + Hyperion 2.25x Barlow coupled to my camera (Nikon D800) via Baader M43/T2 adapter, T2 quick changer, and Nikon T-ring. I have attached two pics showing the pieces partially separated and assembled.

My astrophotography is very basic compared to others in HAS, but you can see some of them in my gallery. You will have to scroll through to the middle to see solar and planetary photographs. Just know that all of these are through a 6" f/10 SCT or 90mm f/7 refractor for planetary astrophotographs and through a 40mm f/10 PST for solar photography, which are very humble telescopes compared to some others in HAS.

From previous discussion, my optimal medium magnification eyepiece (10-13 power/inch) should be around 20-24 mm for the f/10 scopes and around 14-18 mm for the f/7 scope, which is within range of the zoom eyepiece.

[kdrake]

I would suggest that anything over 25x/inch is entering Refractorland! I have on occasion, worked the 24"f/5.6 at 25x/inch with good results. Very rarely do seeing conditions and mirror thermal attitude conspire to give that kind of result. Cain's Magic Number comes from Lee Cain when he was active in building the big binos. He seems to have discovered, and I'm not sure if it was the bino experience, that anything past 13x/inch was unnecessary. He told me that the eye could pick out all the detail available at that magnification. I'm fairly sure that I did not agree with him at the time since so many astronomers of old studied stuff at very high magnification. To this day, I'm sure he was applying that formula to dim stuff (nebulae, galaxies, etc), not planets, double stars or lunar observations.

drako