9MM BAADER MORPHEUS REVIEW
9mm Baader Morpheus - My Review
I am on my third one of these, just like the 12.5mm I own. I keep on coming back to these because they are so comfortable, and have excellent eye relief with or without glasses. Color fidelity is excellent and they are close to 80 degrees AFOV. The 9mm Baader Morpheus has 21mm of eye relief. I have done the flashlight test on the 12.5mm, 9mm and 6.5mm Morpheus. The 12.5mm is 20mm, the 9mm is 21mm, and the 6.5mm is measured at 16mm in ere relief.
The eye lenses are pretty flat, so none of the eye relief gets eaten up from what I can see, except for maybe 1mm from the eye cup. The 9mm is easy to use if you need glasses. Like the 12.5mm, it plays nice with a barlow lens giving me 240x and 340x with my two barlows.
I use the 9mm a lot becasue it is close to that "magic 2mm exit pupil" for globular clusters, medium sized planetary nebulae, and other objects. Eye positioning is very easy with the 9mm, just like it is with the 12.5mm Morpheus. I can easily "hover" over the lens or cup my eye to keep stray light out. I sometimes pull my oversized hoodie over the eyepiece to make things darker if needed. I used to own all of the TeleVue Delos, but I sold them all off to get the Baader Morpheus because they give me more of an "immersive" feel to them. The Delos are a tad sharper, but I can sacrifice that sharpness for such a big AFOV. The sharpness difference is slight, and not that big, IMO. When looking at globular clusters at high power with the Baader Morpheus, I still get that "sharp speckles of salt on a velvet background" look to them. The glass in the Morpheus is top notch from what I can see. Coatings are applied really nicely as well. Green, and purple in reflected light.
Like the 12.5mm Baader Morpheus, the 9mm Morpheus is close to 1 pound in weight. I like that kind of weight on my focuser, as opposed to 2-3 Lbs.
I use the 9mm with two barlow lenses that I own on Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and also Mars. I use it on Jupiter at 240x, Saturn at 280x, Mars at 280x-340x and Venus at 240x, depending on the phase. The field stop on the 9mm is slightly "soft" in daylight, but at night it looks sharp and the softness is gone and is not an issue.
Unless something better comes along, I will be keeping the 9mm and 12.5mm Baader Morpheus eyepieces. Now that Pentax has the 23mm and 16.5mm 85° eyepieces, it would take them to put out a 6mm, 7mm, 9mm or 12mm in order to change my mind, lol.
That's about it for this eyepiece review!
Clear and Dark Skies to all :)
-Mark