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Coating and Blackened Interior of our TS WA 2" Eyepieces
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Aside from field correction and sharpness you should also compare other properties of eyepieces. Transmission is one point that is very important for Deep-Sky use, but without properly blackened interior and baffling any eyepiece will throw up bright images with a poor contrast.
You can easily do the test yourself: Just put the eyepiece on a dark surface and take care of good lighting conditions (daylight). Then look onto the front lens from an angle of about 45°. The brighter the lens surface you can see, the more stray light exists inside the eyepiece. This stray light will diminish contrast. |
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From left to right:
Wild 30 - a popular Deep-Sky eyepieces from German army reserves TeleVue Panoptic 27 - a top-notch Deep-Sky eyepiece TS WA 42 - a low-cost Deep-Sky eyepiece of high quality You can see that the eyepiece on the left produces a lot of stray light. Coating and baffling are poor. When compared with the Panoptic or the TS WA the background of the image rendered by this eyepiece will be brighter, resulting in reduced contrast. Both the TS WA and the Panoptic are much darker, you will have a noticeably better contrast when you look through these eyepieces. When it comes to the blackened interior of the eyepiece body these two eyepieces very closely match one-another. To be fair with the 4x as expensive TeleVue Panoptic, though, this eyepiece has other advantages when compared with the TS WA. It can be used in very fast Newtonians down to f/4 with good field sharpness. When you compare image clarity and contrast the TS WA will perform nearly as well as the Panoptic. |