Compared a $30 eyepiece to a $200 one on the same nebula photo setup and wow the difference was huge

I've been shooting M42 the Orion nebula for like 2 years with this cheap Plossl eyepiece I got off Amazon. Decided last weekend to borrow my friend's Tele Vue Delos 10mm he swore by. Same telescope, same camera, same night. The cheap one had all this purple fringing around the stars and the nebula looked kinda washed out. The expensive one? Crisp stars, way more detail in the dust lanes. I couldn't believe what I was missing. Has anyone else done a side by side like that and been shocked at what a better eyepiece does?

3 comments

3 Comments

fiona_kim976d ago

Different gear just shows you how good your seeing is.

brooke_jones6d ago

The 4-inch Dobsonian I started with was a total joke compared to my 10-inch, but honestly the smaller scope taught me so much about patience and actually looking. @fiona_kim97 you're totally right, switching gear just proves how bad my eyes are at picking out detail in bad seeing conditions. Last week I was trying to split a double star with my 8-inch SCT and it looked like a blurry blob, but my buddy's cheap 6-inch showed it perfectly clear on the same night. It's humbling, really, all that money spent and still getting humbled by basic atmospheric wobble.

blair_chen816d ago

Same pattern with cloud cover @brooke_jones, the universe keeps us humble no matter what we spend.