newbie eypiece ?

Hi all,
As I said in another post I bought an Orion 8" Newtonian reflector scope. It comes with the two basic lens. What would be the next best lens to get? Some others have said to get the better quality ones which I agree but which ones? I would like to see some of the planets up closer such as Saturn, Mars, etc. Any and all comments are welcome.
I plan on joing an Astronomy Club and going to some Star parties as soon as I can as I am completely new to this.

Thanks,

Kevin

anyone care to chime in???

Kevin,

You did not mention which 8" - the dob (f6) or the eq (f5).

I have the f5. For DSO's I typically use a Meade 24.5 SWA and jump to the Meade 14 UWA. On brighter stuff I will jump to the Meade 8.8 UWA. The 14 UWA is by far the pick of the litter.

Chasing planets, I would start with the ep's that came with it then jump to a 7mm then to a 5mm. The UO Orthos work pretty well. You could skip the 5mm and get a good barlow then step down (depending on seeing) from 10mm to 7mm to 10mm barlowed to 7mm barlowed. Your mirror will probably not handle anything stronger then the 7mm barlowed, even on the best nights.

Good luck and enjoy the scope.

Ed

Hello:
While I'm not going to recommend any particular eyepieces, it's very good that you're going to join a club and go to star parties. While there, learn everything you can from the old hands. Pick thier brains, and most of all try out their stuff! Most folks are more than happy to let you use an eyepiece to try it out on your scope. Being able to try out an eyepiece on YOUR scope is very important, since some eyepieces work better than others on certain scopes in different situations. Also, you'll be able to explore what you find to be the practical magnification limit for your equipment. There's nothing worse than forking out big $ for an eyepiece that gives a magnification that's too high, or where you can only use it once a year when the seeing is good enough. Also, as magnification increases, any instability in the mount and the motion of the object through the field of view get magnified. With Dobsonians there's a happy medium between getting a high enough power to see neat stuff vs. having to move the telescope so often you hardly have time to look. So go to as many star parties as you can, try out as much stuff as you can, and find out what works best for your scope and for you.

Cheers
Mike

P.S. You can't go wrong with a good Plossl or Orthoscopic for planetary observing...they're cheap and hard to beat.

A good quality 2x barlow (Tele Vue, Orion's "Shorty Plus", Celestron's Ultima barlow) will give you 200x with your standard 10mm eyepiece. This will be a great planetary power with an 8-inch scope (depending on your local seeing conditions, but 200x is useful in most locations). The barlow is likely to be useful for a long time, regardless of what eyepieces you eventually get.

Orion's Plossl's are fine to start with. I'm all for high quality eyepieces, but it's good to start with a cheap basic set for a while until you get a better idea of what you want. If you stick mainly to planetary viewing, you may just want to upgrade to something like high quality plossl's or orthoscopics; on the other hand you may want to splurge on at least one wide field eyepiece for low power (a 24mm televue panoptic would be a nice match for your scope, IMO). But before spending that kind of $$, it's worth taking a little time.