Baader Hyperion 31mm, 24mm, and 10mm Eyepiece Review

By: Vlad Fedosov
02/25/2024

Intro:

Anyone who has followed my YouTube channel(www.youtube.com/@AVTAstro) knows that I’m a bit of a Baader 24-8mm Zoom fan! Interestingly enough for one reason or another, I have not had too much experience with many of Baader’s other eyepiece lines. I recently had the Baader Hyperion 31mm, 24mm, and 10mm eyepieces and was excited to see if they lived up to the very positive experience I have had with the Baader Zoom(I like it so much that I own two of them!). Hyperions boast a wide, 68° apparent field of view, multi-coated optics, and a curious feature of modularity. Let’s dive right in and see how these guys perform under the night sky!

Testing:

I tested the Hyperions in my simi-dark Mag 5 backyard here in the NW. The testing of the eyepieces was over several nights with a Brandon f/7 94mm APO and a Takahashi f/7 TOA-130 APO. Starting off with the center FOV of the eyepieces I did quite a bit of observing of Jupiter with the 10mm Hyperion (the other two provided too little magnification) in the TOA-130 which resulted in a magnification of about 100x. The image was razor sharp at this relatively low power and I could easily say was about as good as any eyepiece that I have ever used. Quite an encouraging result as a starter!

Switch

Switching out to deep-sky objects I proceeded to switch between the three focal lengths of the eyepieces to get a feel for what I think of the eyepieces. This is where I realized that the rubber grip on the eyepieces was one of the best I have used. It gives you a very reassuring grip on the eyepiece when switching them out even on cold nights such as when I was testing these! The general size of the eyepieces is on the mid-level, but I do believe a bit larger than most other brand 68° eyepieces from memory(perhaps this is due to the modularity aspect of these). 

Starting with the 31mm when viewing a few open clusters I could immediately tell that there was some fairly severe coma(where stars look more like comets rather than pinpoints) starting at about the outer 50% FOV. This was a bit disappointing, and I was sincerely hoping that the 24mm and 10mm did not have this same negative optical effect. Well after some examination, I was happy to see that the coma was not as bad in the 24mm and pretty much ignorable in the 10mm(only affecting maybe the last 15% of the FOV). Contrast and sharpness especially in the center of the FOV were noted as being on par with other similar eyepieces.

What about the modularity feature of the eyepieces? In all honestly I did not test this. To me, this is more of a feature from days that have past. Today I don’t see the application of doing eyepiece projection with most modern cameras especially when there are such good inexpensive dedicated astronomy cameras(check out my YouTube reviews of the SVbony 105: https://youtu.be/OB3zc3jHkIM and SVbony 205: https://youtu.be/n_lgabE7LPo).

Conclusion:

Are the Hyperion eyepieces ones that I feel are gerat like the Baader Zoom? Well in all honesty I really found the performance of the 31mm fairly disappointing. The 24mm is acceptable and the 10mm being good. The overall concise conclusion on these is that unless you need the modularity aspect of the eyepieces something like the Explore Scientific 68° eyepieces or especially the TeleVue Panoptics are much better-corected eyepieces. Clear skies!