Five most valuable OOP eyepieces

"Jon Isaacs" wrote:
Its too bad you don't find it breath-taking in your Stowaway, from a dark
sky I
find it so in my Pronto....

As they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Get with the program, man. Everything is relative. Relative to my 10" MCT, I
would not call the view of M42 in my StowAway as breathtaking.

On Sun, 5 Dec 2004 19:21:06 -0500, "JJK" wrote:

"Jon Isaacs" wrote:
Its too bad you don't find it breath-taking in your Stowaway, from a dark
sky I
find it so in my Pronto....

As they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Get with the program, man. Everything is relative. Relative to my 10" MCT, I
would not call the view of M42 in my StowAway as breathtaking.


Until you've seen red in the nebula through a 30-40" Dob, you really
don't cross that "threshold" from average view to spectacular.
-Rich

"RichA" wrote:
Until you've seen red in the nebula through a 30-40" Dob, you really
don't cross that "threshold" from average view to spectacular.


I've seen more than red in M42 with my 20" Obsession. In addition to the
most obvious blue and green, the colors include:

thundercloud purple the gossamer wings,
pastel pink, yellow, rose and orange in the central part of the nebula

In my 25" Obsession (I gave into even larger aperture fever; I'll be selling
the 20" scope soon), on the sharp edge of the nebula, thin stripes of red,
yellow green are visible (not chromatic aberration)

I'd love to see M42 in an even larger scope.

"Jon Isaacs"
The point is one does not have to view it through an expensive
10 inch MCT for it to be breath taking. As I said beauty is in the
eye of the beholder. Sure its nice to see the 6 stars of the Trap,
and yes they show up quite nicely in my 12.5 inch DOB, but the
Orion Nebula is not about a couple of pinpoint stars, its a nebulosity,
averted vision and that stuff.

Yeah, its nice to have decent optics, but the name of the game
is enjoying what you see.....

I enjoy what I see through each of my telescopes, so please don't be so
pedantic with me. To get back on track once again, I answered someone's
question regarding the use of a Leitz EP. I often use it in my 10" MCT. Once
again, as I stated before, I also doubt anyone can use that or any 2" EP in
a $50 WalMart refractor. Your lecture on the obvious keeps causing you to
misunderstood the fact that I merely answered someone's question about a
valuable OOP EP (which is the point of this thread).

You don't need a 12.5" telescope to see 6 stars in the Trapezium. A very
small aperture scope should suffice, if your observing skills are up to
snuff.

M42 isn't about anything. It's a complex object that we're fortunate enough
to be able to see with the unaided eye and with telescopes of all sizes. It
doesn't care whether you view if through a very low cost refractor (using
averted imagination), a 10" MCT (w/a nice EP and a magnificent view), a 25"
Dob-Newt (for hours using direct or averted vision), or a 36" Dob-Newt (and
I'd bet seeing what the Great Nebula really has to offer). I prefer to view
it in telescopes that over time, have shown me the object in more of its
glory than I've ever seen it in any small scope. I am impressed by how much
I can see of M42 with the 92mm refractor. However, I really prefer the view
of it through my 10" MCT and larger scopes. If you prefer the view it and
everything else through a $50 refractor, that's fine w/me.

Even my 155mm f/7 apo doesn't show the details in M42 that I can see w/the
10" scope. There are lovely little jewel-like stars in the heart of the
nebula that only start to become easily visible (at near sea-level in mag 6
skies or worse) w/the mid-size refractor (they appear reddish against the
blue-green nebulosity). More of them appear with each significant gain in
aperture (10", then 20" and then 25"). These stars really give M42 a whole
new appearance that is simply not possible to imagine from views in smaller
scopes. The first time I noticed these was during an observing session with
my 20" Obsession (at that time, I only had an AP Traveler and the 20"
scope). The hairs on the back of my head rose during that primal experience.
The view was truly magnificent.

And yes, I enjoy what I see with each of those scopes (even the tiny ones).
However, regarding aperture, "some people say why ... I say why not". If one
only has a small aperture scope (as I did for quite a while), I strongly
recommend viewing the best and brightest DSOs through a decent larger
aperture telescope owned by someone else before your eyes get too old to
appreciate magnificent views in Technicolor and less bloated stars (assuming
the seeing's decent, the transparency good, and the optics are thermally
equilibrated with the ambient air temperature). I was fortunate enough to
have a few friends with some decent size scopes. The views through those
babies convinced me to save up for a larger aperture scope. I have no
regrets (except for not yet having an even larger scope).