David Knisely
(Postmaster)
05/20/08 05:02 PM
Re: Strange Results in Eyepiece FOV Comparisons

Quote:

Hi, I have a 31 nagler and and just received a Ethos 13mm.
with a laserpointer you can easy measure the FOV by pointing the laser through the eyepiece on to a board,
After some playing with the laser you will notice the edge of the field on the board, mark this edge of the fieldstop (of the eyepiece) ON the board,
slide the laser to the opposite of the fiedstop and mark it also.

Measure the distance between the eyepiece focal point and the board.
Measure also the distance between the markings.

With basic mathematics (and a calculator with tangent) I calculate for the 31 Nagler (first measure): 84 degree
(second measure): 83 degree.
For the Ethos (first measure): 99.96 degree
(second measure): 100.2 degree

Simply a 31 Nagler HAS a 82 degree field, and a Ethos HAS a 100 degree field.

Holland from the Netherlands




I have edited things here. This is a *very* good method, but does not require a laser. All you need is a well-collimated flashlight of sufficient size and a fairly parallel output. "Lambo" and I did this tonight. We set things up and moved the flashlight around a bit until we could actually see the edges of the field stop projected on the wall. Usually, you can't see both edges at the same time, but for a number of eyepieces, the whole disk from field stop edge to field stop edge was visible. Particularly amusing was his little reticle eyepiece, where we saw the reticle projected as well. To get the precise location of the focal point, we put the flaslight several meters away from the eyepiece so as to approximate a distant source. The fields of view we got were nearly identical to that using my method, but for the wider field eyepieces, they ended up closer to the figures given by the manufacturer. Indeed, I suspect that because of the difficulty in viewing both side of the field stop at the same time in the eyepiece, my "both eyes open" method may occasionally be somewhat less accurate than this nice projection method. When we measured the 24mm Panoptic, we got *exactly* 68.0 degrees rather than the 69.5 degrees I had with the "both eyes open" technique. The only eyepiece which gave us a few headaches was my old Meade 14mm Ultrawide, as the flashlight had to be held very steady to get the field edges to be projected with any repeatability. My 40mm Mk-70 Konig ended up having an apparent field of 68.8 degrees rather than the nearly 70 degrees I had gotten earlier. Johns old 32mm Burgess was 70.9 degrees, while his 20mm Type 5 Nagler was 80.5 degrees. This is a simple yet quite elegant way of measuring the apparent field of view, so again, thanks a bunch for bringing it to light. Clear skies to you.



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