Beginning of the Orthos tests

Well, I looked at a few of the Orthos last night and the week before and am beginning to form some opinions on the Clave, Pentax, Zeiss and others that I have been loaned for testing.
The results so far favor the Zeiss. But, not so much for the view as for the eye relief and eye position characteristics and comfort.
The Zeiss and Zeiss Jenna EPs are very sharp and clear as well as good contrast. The field stop is sharp as a tack and of course the field is flat and without curvature.
The Clave has a very good field to and the contrast is on par, but the eye relief and associated black outs is more pronounced, making the difficult to use with glasses and even without them. I found that my eyelashes were in constant contact when seeing the whole FOV.
The Pentax was very good visually, but it was on the verge of bring short on eye relief for glasses and just barely adequate to keep the lashes off the EP.
The Galoc EP was way to tight for my comfort and the wife could not use it at all with glasses and had trouble even without the glasses.
We were using the crater Thebit for comparison as it was next to the terminator and had good contrast and depth as well as some small sharp features.
One of the interesting observations was unexpected however. Both the wife and I found the Pentax XL 10.5 EP showed as much contrast and detail as any of the Orthos, even the Zeiss. Also, it was a little easier to spot some of the very small features and craters with it. There was a quite small light feature on the end of a rill that showed very well in the XL, but did not show as well in the other EPs. :S Not sure what to make of that! I did not expect the XL to compete that well with the high end Orthos, but it did and even perhaps excelled slightly. Very unexpected.
I will be doing some others comparisons soon. Last night was using 10mm range EPs only. Seeing was good but not great and there was a little high haze. But, the conditions were the same for all comparisons, so I think they are still valid.

Floyd Blue said:

[snip]
We were using the crater Thebit for comparison as it was next to the terminator and had good contrast and depth as well as some small sharp features.
One of the interesting observations was unexpected however. Both the wife and I found the Pentax XL 10.5 EP showed as much contrast and detail as any of the Orthos, even the Zeiss. Also, it was a little easier to spot some of the very small features and craters with it. There was a quite small light feature on the end of a rill that showed very well in the XL, but did not show as well in the other EPs. :S Not sure what to make of that! I did not expect the XL to compete that well with the high end Orthos, but it did and even perhaps excelled slightly. Very unexpected.
I will be doing some others comparisons soon. Last night was using 10mm range EPs only. Seeing was good but not great and there was a little high haze. But, the conditions were the same for all comparisons, so I think they are still valid.

Floyd,
If you'll remember, in one of posts not so long ago, I said the Pentax 10.5mm XL was one of my favorites for Lunar observation.
FWIW, I have Univ. Optics orthos (old, new, & HD) and the XL beats them hands down in my 12.5" Starmaster and NP-127.

Clear Skies, Bill

Does the reviewer have any ownership interest in one of
these models vs. another? Is the reviewer used to
viewing with one model more vs. another?

Thanks for the testing and the report, Floyd.
It takes a lot of dedication and focus to look at the same thing
all night long, through one eypiece, then another, then another, then another...
We appreciate it!
Linton

Which Zeiss eyepieces are you using? Are they the 1.25" limited edition Zeiss Abbe ortho astro eyepieces or the later adapted microscope eyepieces?