Astronomy Stuff (With Good News For American Manufacturing)



I mentioned a few days ago that I had purchased an 85mm eyepiece from Russell Optics in Arizona--and yes, they make them in America, they aren't just an importer. I received the eyepiece yesterday, and the sky was clear enough last night to make use of it.



My first impression of the eyepiece was not favorable--the body is made of Delrin, not metal, and the label is a little on the cheap side.







However, the use of Delrin means that the eyepiece weighs about seven ounces--really very light for a 2" diameter eyepiece. There are some monsters made by Televue that weigh a lot more than this, leading to astronomers talking about "Al Nagler's Hand Grenade."



Being a very low power eyepiece, it revealed that my diagonal was dirty, so I had to clean it. When I finally put the eyepiece into use last night, however, wow! I should be seeing something close to three degrees of sky with my refractor, and it was apparent that this was the case. The image of the Moon was breathtaking--and there were stars visible around the Moon--showing reasonably good light baffling in both the telescope and the eyepiece.



One problem that a lot of widefield eyepieces have is inconsistency across the field; objects at the edge require a slightly different focus than objects in the middle; there are often distortions at the edge of the field. The Russell 85mm exhibited none of these behaviors; objects at the edge were just as sharp as they were in the center of the eyepiece. This will make a fabulous dark sky eyepiece--as soon as I get a dark sky in which to use it. (I had a long conversation with the Boise streetlight engineer yesterday--perhaps I will blog about that soon.)



Best of all, this monstrous eyepiece cost me $70 with shipping. (He was having a sale this week--ordinarily it is $75.)



I also had a chance to use my 8" f/7 reflector, now that I have rings to mount it on my Losmandy mount (also American-made). Yes, this is a giant leap up from the Cave mount--although it still wouldn't hurt to knock a bit more weight off this telescope. I had a chance to show Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, and the Moon to a passing pedestrian with the reflector--and as these objects usually do, they absolutely dazzled him. Cassini's Division was easily visible, and perhaps because of my care in remounting the mirror during the recent rebuild, I had no problem seeing cloud bands on Saturn itself.