Brief Eyepiece Reviews At Pinos

I finally got the chance to test my celestron 2.3mm ED eyepiece on Mars at Pinos on 11-05. The seeing permitted it after midnight in my 16" F 4.5 dob.
In general, I don't recommend the eyepiece. While it has ample eye relief and a large eye lens and lacks lateral color, it also lacks contrast and was no match for a 4mm vixen eyepiece paired with a 2X barlow.
A sleeper of an eyepiece is the 2" 32mm astrola eyepiece that accompanied my 10" hardin dob. It's apparently a GSO derived unit with about 55 degrees AFOV with a marginal amount of coma around the edges. Nice eye relief, no blackouts, and it did very well on the Veil nebula with an 0111 filter in my 16". Decent contrast and, for what it is, it's a sweet eyepiece.
Conditions at Pinos were very good with minimal temperature drops to about 50 degrees with intermittent clouds throughout the night. I had the best view ever of m33 with a crystalline presentation in my dob as well as in my former 12.5" discovery truss dob. I used a 15 mm ultima wideangle (forerunner to the axiom) and the galaxy appeared to explode in the eyepiece. My ex 12.5 Discovery did very well with it, too.
Very little traffic at Pinos with about 20 amateurs with several large APO refractors and a new 20" starmaster at first light: very impressive!

Hi Rod,
We were down at Lockwood Valley last night. The seeing was about the same as what you had. I got some nice views of a few new objects and a lot of the standard objects.
It is unusual that we differ in our opinions on the 32mm Astrola. I found it to be pretty poor. :S I was sent one for free and tried two others that came with friends Hardin scopes and all three had poor edge performance with a lot of CA and field curvature. During daytime testing they were really bad! I mean the CD was terrible and the edge was very far out of focus. Perhaps there is quite a lot of variation in quality in these EPs?
Thanks for letting us know about the 2.3mm ED. It is always nice to get some information about products.
Who had the 20" Starmaster? Was it a fellow and his wife? I can not remember their names but they looked through my 14.5" for an evening and were talking about buying one and I heard that they had, just did not know what size.
So the 20" was pretty nice huh? I bet it was!