Tak 2.8mm and 3.6 mm LE eyepieces

I would appreciate hearing from someone who has used these extremely short focal length Tak eyepieces. What was your impression of using these versus Barlowing longer focal length eyepieces? How would you compare them to Tak orthos, Zeiss orthos, Televue Plossls? Thanks
Kim Colter

Hi Kim,

I had the 3.6 and 2.8 Taks last summer and tried them in a 4 and 6 inch APO.

As for eye relief, I felt they were easier to use than my 4, 5 or 6 UO's that I have. The planets were not up yet unfortunately, so had to use the moon and double stars etc to judge sharpness, contrast etc. I felt they were extremely
sharp, as good or better than my 5 or 7.5 LE's. They also held up to Barlowing very well, allowing very high magnification possibilities with short focal length refractors. For example, on the Dbl/Dbl, I observed at over 150 per inch in a 4 inch and the image fidelity was exceptional. They also performed very well on clusters, globs and faint fuzzies. I was tickled to death by their performance. Thought I had found the ultimate short focal length eyepieces for fast refractors.

But I ran into a serious problem with the new Taks and have been waiting to see what opinions others will have on these eyepieces. When using these eyepieces on the Moon or Sun, I encountered a severe ghost image making the eyepiece useless IMHO. This ghosting presents itself when the image of the moon/sun does not fill up the entire FOV. When this
happens, I see a ghost image that covers around 75% of the FOV, it was a soft lit out of focus ghost that destroyed the image.

I was totally disappointed by this. I discovered that the only way I could begin to eliminate the ghost image was to fold down the rubber eye cup and press my eyeball against the lens. This was to the point where I was seeing
my reflection of my eyelashes. I then got out my 7.5 LE and discovered that if I moved my eye way off center that a very faint ghost image also appeared. But I had to really work at it for this to happen. I have owned my Tak LE eyepieces for over 5 years and had never noticed
this in the past.

At first I figured that I had a pair of defective eyepieces, but not anymore. At the WSP I found someone who had the new 2.8 and 3.6 Taks. We both observed the same ghost image on the moon in his TEC 8" Mak. He said he
had same ghosting problem in his TEC140. So the focal length of the scope did not make a difference, ghosting was same in both scopes. The owner tried to blacken the edges, shiny spots with no success. He said there appeared to
be a bright spot internal to the lower lens assembly, but he could not disassemble it. And now I have seen another report about ghosting on the Takahishi forums.

Stephen