By: Vlad Fedosov
Intro:
The Panoptic line of TeleVue is the gold standard of “wide-field” eyepieces. The wide-field category of eyepieces encompasses all oculars that are around 70° FOV. The Panoptic line comes in at 68°. Eye relief of the eyepieces is rated at 13mm. The Eyepiece weights 6.6oz.
Testing:
I had the 19mm Panoptic out for a night of observing in mid-October during a partial moon under my mag 4 suburban sky. The telescope used was my C8 XLT with a 2″ dielectric diagonal. I did test the eyepiece with a 1.25″ TeleVue Barlow as well. Seeing and transparency were average that night.
I will start off by saying that this eyepiece is a pure joy to use. The FOV of the Panoptic is very comfortable to take all in at once. The decent eye relief definitely helps with this as well as the forgiving placement of the eye in relation to the eyepiece.
I used the double-double in Lyra as my test target to evaluate the eyepiece. All 4 members were split at the 105x that the 19mm provides with a c8. using the barlow the split was a lot easier and obvious. the eyepiece does barlow very well as expected and is a good weight for this. The stars across about 85-90% of the FOV were totally pinpoint and the rest showed just a slight amount of distortion. I compared the Panoptic to the Celestron Ultima-LX on the same night and to my surprise I fount the Ultima-LX compared VERY well to the Panoptic. I also have a pair of 20mm Explore Scientific 68° that I use in my binoviewer and to my eyes, there is not a lot of difference compared to the Panoptic. I do like the smaller size of the Panoptic, however for bino use.
Conclusion:
There is a reason the Panoptic line of TeleVue is the gold standard of “wide-field” eyepieces. They perform very well and are just plain fun to use with a wide easy to take in FOV. I will say that there are many options on the market today that will give you 90-99% of the performance of the Panoptic line for a fraction of the price. But if you have to have the best, look no further then the Panoptic.
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