Pentax Eyepieces

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ray_parkhurst
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Pentax Eyepieces

Post by ray_parkhurst »

I went to an estate sale today (a separate post is in order for this sale to end all sales) and they had several Pentax XW Eyepieces for sale. Initially I did not know what they were. I did not recognize them as eyepieces because they were absolutely gigantic. I thought my 15x B&L UWFs were huge, but these dwarfed the B&L's. Checking online I see they are for telescopes. I am wondering if folks have had any experience with them, or if they are appropriate, for microscope viewing. I suppose they are too big to work for stereoscopes, but perhaps for others? They look like this one:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/284945744746

Troels
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Re: Pentax Eyepieces

Post by Troels »

I have for years used the PENTAX eyepiece XW14 with my mini spotting scope for wide field bird wathing at around 30x mag.
It is a state of the art eyepiece with huge field and impressive sharpness and color correction. A pleasure to use.

These Pentax eyepieces also have a high reputation among amateur astronomers.
I has become my favourite eyepiece for use with a 6" Dobson astronomical telescope giving 86x magnification and a huge field of view.

They are made for telescope use with the standard 1.25" diameter mount and I doubt they will fit most micoscopes.
The big diameter makes them unpractical for binocular viewing.
Troels Holm, biologist (retired), environmentalist, amateur photographer.
Visit my Flickr albums

ray_parkhurst
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Re: Pentax Eyepieces

Post by ray_parkhurst »

Thanks for the info. Indeed they are huge! Glad to know they are high quality. My B&L 15x UWF give an almost "immersive" experience when viewing, almost like an IMAX theater. I assume the big Pentax are even more so.

Scarodactyl
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Re: Pentax Eyepieces

Post by Scarodactyl »

I have seen people using them with microscopes, but it never seems to get past the experimental phase. One issue is that microscopes are rarely limited by their eyepieces in the first place, unlike telescopes where they play a similar role to objectives on a microscope.

Troels
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Re: Pentax Eyepieces

Post by Troels »

The apparent angle of view of this 14 mm Pentax eyepiece is 70 degrees. Not exactly the almost 180 (?) degrees of an Imax theater.
But enough to create a feeling of looking at more than you can grasp with a sigle view.
Troels Holm, biologist (retired), environmentalist, amateur photographer.
Visit my Flickr albums

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