Nagler

Today I received the 7mm TeleVue Nagler, which gives me 86x with the 80mm refractor and 357x with the 254mm SCT. The seeing was once again excellent, but I only observed for about an hour this time, with the 80mm refractor and mostly the same objects as I did for the past couple of nights. With this eyepiece the Lumicon UHC filter is actually useful on M57 at 86x. I could clearly see the darkening in the center of this planetary nebula.

I could also split Epsilon Lyrae at 86x, and at 171x using the 2x barlow it's a beauty.

I also looked at Polaris this evening, which is a binary star with magnitude 2.0 and 8.2 stars separated by 18.4". The glare introduced by the barlow made it actually easier to observe the secondary at 86x than at 171x. Because I use the Meade 4000 series 2x Apochromatic Barlow (#140) also for planetary imaging, I wonder how much contrast I loose for that.

Although I find barlows rather clumsy for visual observing, maybe I should try to sell it and get a TeleVue 2x Powermate instead. The barlow doesn't have any obvious poor baffling or paint. It's just that its coating is quite reflective in comparison to my TeleVue eyepieces.