Posts Made By: Floyd Blue

Interesting review style, very thorough. He certainly tested several times and made revisions to his findings, which is good.

Put a comment on the guys rating explaining all of this.

I am considering deleting the whole thread from Frank James concerning the set of EPs and the damage to them. I am not too happy about what is going on here.
What do you guys think? :S

Thanks for the update Dan, but I did state that the thread has been terminated. When I state that the thread is terminated and that any more posts would be deleted, this is exactly what I mean.
So, I am terminating the thread permanently, by deleting the entire thread as I warned would happen if my request was ignored. :S

Well, I just traded my 24mm Panoptic for a 16mm Nagler t-5. I was not using the 24mm Pan that much as I have the 22mm and 20mm Naglers. So, when a fellow Astromarter, Mark, was looking for one I thought I would give the 16mm t-6 a try. It will be interesting to see how it stands up next to the 17mm t-4.
I will give a report after I have a change to give it a good trial.

It is surprising that Nascar can be called boring. It has one of the largest turnouts of any sports. TV races have huge followings and ratings. I never find it boring. I do like other forms of racing too of course. Even Airplane Pylon Racing requires going around a closed course with turns in one direction, but it is anything by boring. :S

Just received my new Sky Commander XP4 and it seems very nice. I just Flashed it with the latest Data Base. Nice to have named stars and objects now.

I was out testing my scope for Telescope Pointing System Analysis (TPAS) last night.

Testing was performed on a Siebert 5.9mm Starsplitter for a friend.

I tested the Starsplitter against the 6mm Radian and 6mm UO HD Ortho and it did very well.

I will say that it is a good EP with eye relief and a FOV that is stated to be 65°. For $100 they are a good choice in that type EP.

The Radian is slightly better on through-put but has more color at the very edge.

The UO HD Ortho is identical to the Radian except for FOV being 45°-47° so a bit smaller and no color at the edge. The UO HD Orthos is $79.95 and is the best deal for the price of the 3 EPs.

The Radian is the best of the 3 by a hair, unless you take away points for the slight color at the edge, which I find to be a no big deal. This was because of the FOV and comfort more as well as the edge on contrast. The contrast on the Moon and Jupiter was even slightly better than the UO Ortho to my eye. Jupiter showed a little more detail in the bands with the Radian. The UO Ortho was so close though that it was almost a draw. But the narrow FOV and tighter Eye relief of the Ortho made it not the winner.

The Starsplitter has slightly less contrast on Jupiter, most of the details were there but just not as sharp due to the contrast I feel. It made the bands a little less bright and the festoons just did not pop out the same as the Radian or the UO Ortho.

The Starsplitter is a close second to the others. It has a good edge with no color but lack just a bit in the contrast and through-put compared to the other two. There was one other thing that I noticed when viewing Jupiter. When Jupiter was near the edge there was a scatter halo around the planet, it forms sort of rays too. Not terrible, but it was there. I felt it was more distracting than the color of the Radian. I also thought I saw a TINY bit of field curvature on the Moon. Very little and difficult to be certain so I will not make any real point of it.

Of the 3 EPs I preferred the Radian, just because it was more comfortable and had a slight edge on the Starsplitter.

The UO Ortho was overall a match in performance though and sharp with no color or curvature or scatter.

To rate the Starsplitter I will have to give it a good score. It performed well and the FOV was good and sharp. Contrast down slightly was not so apparent on DSO and it worked well to resolve clusters and show double stars. It was comfortable to use, light weight and easy to see with all the bare aluminum. Fit and finish was good and it came with a bolt case but no caps. Overall a good deal for $99 and a good performer. Compared t the price of the Radian you have to give the EP credit for it's performance level. Not a disappointment at all and rather a pleasant surprise.

I perfer the dry feel, it is not as hard to spin and nothing ever gets on anything. I found the XW to be rather stiff compared to the XL in this respect. It bordered on hard to turn and require the EP be secured tightly in the focuser to avoid spinning the EP instead of the cup. Without the grease it would have been easy to turn, but I could not get it apart to clean it as you stated in your post.

I must say that the latest Mars missions have shown the viability of robotic missions. They can persist for a long time, require no habitat and can do most anything we can do ourselves. Plus the cost is much less and more missions can be performed to more places with these savings. It would be possible to finance a complete set of missions to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn for the cost of one manned mission to Mars. Seems to me that we do not need to place our feet on Mars just so we can say we have. Technology will come and make it much more feasible to send people to Mars. But right now, our technology is really quite primitive for this type of mission.
Now, going back to the Moon. Why, what can we learn that we can not learn with a probe. It is a long time before we can place a colony on the Moon. Maybe never, if we don't come up with some new ways of surviving up there is brutal space. We can not shield everyone from a Solar Flare so they would always be in danger of getting irradiated.
I feel that we should do more manned missions, but I think these can wait until we have better methods to achieve them. :S