Telescope Reviews: Masuyama`s

Your 25 mm wide-field (65 deg. AFOV) is indeed rare. The regular 1.25" x 52 deg. AFOV 5 element true Masuyama's are in and of themselves quite rare and hard to come by, but this one is indeed a great find that will certainly climb in value almost 'astronomically' (ahem) as the years go by.

I nearly burned myself out researching and posting my findings here on CN awhile back in the thread you reference, but something of a tiff came up (the details of which I will not publicly discuss at all, so please don't ask) and as a result I asked to be completely 100% expunged from CN, and sadly they fully obliged. With this my entire input to my own thread about the history of the Masuyama went "poof". BTW, we did make up, and as you can tell I did come back!! :-)

Much of what I learned about the Masuyama's came from glossing through old records from long past public internet forum postings (most from well before CN was even conceived, with some dating to as early as 1993). Many of the old timers I got bits and pieces of info from actually freq this site, so I must give credit where it is due, and I defer to them to come forward again and re-contribute this knowledge right here in this Masuyama thread. In no particular order, I toss out a few names of those contributors I tapped from in the past:

"Ed T" knows a bunch about the particular subject of the 'ATM' (pronounced 'ATOM') company which exclusively retailed the Masuyama eyepieces in Japan, and I believe he freq's this site on occasion, so I would welcome his input here to expound on this aspect of the saga of the Masuyama, and whatever else he can enlighten us with as well.

Among others who 'freq' here and have some pieces of knowledge of the Masuyama saga are Thomas M. Back (TMB), whom I came across telling of them in a 1993 dated public file on the Usenet.

Pete Rasmussen is another old internet friend with much to tell regarding Masuyama, and he pops in here on occasion as well.

The two Dave's I always seem to confuse, Dave Mitsky and Dave Bush, also both have much knowledge of the history of Masuyama, and I believe that both freq. this forum as well.

Roland Christen (of Astro Physics) and Markus Ludes (of ATM [note, a different ATM]) have knowledge of Masuyama which might be a bit hard to extract (I couldn't get either of them to talk), but my knowledge of their Masuyama involvement came as a result of a rather comical public internet forum tiff between them over exclusive rights to a binoviewer, in which Roland finally asked Marcus if his binoviewer was made by Masuyama as Roland's offering was. Yet more proof that Masuyama still lives, as of at least not too far into the past....

Based on old internet forum posts, Gary Hand (of Hands On Optics) also has info he can relay to us as well.

Many have bits and pieces of the story, and all (including those many names I have forgotten to make mention of here) are welcomed to chime in and help us unravel the mystery of the Masuyama.

Of course (last but not least) my optical guru Bratislav Curcic could not be left out. Here I quote him from an old public Usenet forum discussion in regard to the Masuyama's:

"they have about the best polish of all commercial eyepieces I've seen (I haven't seen new Zeiss ones), excellent coating (not as good as Pentax I have to admit), pure glass (less yellow than Claves) and excellent mechanical design. In friend's 6" f/11 APO they so clearly outperformed Naglers on AND off axis...."

And another Bratsilav quote: "I have to admit that it took me more than one night to convince myself of superiority of Masuyama over Tanny (as sold by UO) Orthos."

One last Bratislav quote (for now at least): "I was told that Masuyama was taken over by Takahashi, and will not make Masuyama eyepieces anymore (as they already have a line of top quality eyepieces anyway). RIP Masuyama, with Clave, Zeiss and other top eyepieces ..."

BTW, I've conversed with Bratislav Curcic via email quite recently and invited him to participate here on CN, but he stated that he has 100% retired from all participation in public forums. He did however take the time to calculate for me the precise degree of Hyperbolic figure to apply to my 30" f/4.1 mirror, for permanent use with a Baader MPCC coma corrector (which he completely reverse engineered), but that is another story...

Here are the specs for all of the known Masuyama's:

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My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a moral being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

Ayn Rand (in the appendix to 'Atlas Shrugged')