1rpd 30mm 80deg

I bought one of these, but it has been cloudy or raining at my house for weeks, which is good in N.M., but...

I was curious if anyone here has any experiences, if it has been covered in this forum in some way that can be recoverd(I looked at the last 90 days), or in any other venue.

My impression of it in daytime is positive, but I'm a novice. It seems to resolve as well as my 32mm 52 deg "fully multicoated" Celestron ep.

I have to say that, while I bought it to have the widest field available from my f8 6" refractor, I looked foward to the 80deg field after seeing all the discussion of "Porthole". So far it hasn't knocked me out, to my suprise, and, I guess, economic relief.

Thanks,

Dan

I have had very good experiences with the BW-Optik 30 mm Ultrawide eyepiece (which, as someone else mentioned, is substantially the same as the 1 rpd ep you mentioned). I use the ep for auxiliary wide-field views in my Orion 80ED refractor (7.5 focal ratio) to supplement the closer higher power views of the same objects in my 8-inch SCT. For example, last Saturday (August 6) at my club's dark sky site, I admired NGC6231, a beautiful jewel box of an open cluster in the southern reaches of Scorpius, in the SCT at 68x with a 15 mm Panoptic ep; and then I trained the 80ED with the BW-Optik ep on that cluster and the region north of it. This gave me a breathtaking view of the full extent of what has been referred to as the "false comet," which is about 2½º in angular length and consists of NGC6231, Trumpler 24 and Collinder 316. If you have access to back issues of Sky & Telescope, you can get a good idea of what I saw from the photo on page 143 of the magazine's July 1999 issue (minus the probably photo-processed coloring of the nebula at the north of the "false comet"); and you can get more information about the "false comet" on page 102 of the same issue and on page 92 of the July 2001 issue. I don't know whether the APOV of the ep is quite 80º or somewhat less, and I suppose the images around its edges are poorer than those in its center, but for its price it is an excellent tool for viewing extended objects.