Telescope Reviews: Garrett Gemini 12x60 LW

Welllll, I did order the Orion 15x63's and I'm very happy with them.Thanks again for the link. I wish I could give a sophisticated first light impression but I'm not that knowledgeable. This is the first pair of bins that I've bought in almost twenty years. I bought them because after looking through scopes for half a century I had an epiphany this past August. Wifey and I woke up in the wee hours, as we've always done every year to look at the Persieds meteor shower. However, this time is was pretty humble viewing through our 4.0 magnitude skies in our back yard. After twenty minutes we had only seen about 3 shooting stars so, wifey gets up and goes in the house to get my Bausch and Lomb 10x40 binoculars and just started looking at the stars. She seemed pretty happy doing so and was impressed with the pleides and just looking at tons of stars we would not normally see with just our eyes. After a while she got up, handed me the binoculars and and said "stick a fork in me, I'm done" and went to bed. So, I started looking at the stars and it was wonderful, kinda magical, like when I go to a dark area in the country for the first time in a long time. I thought, well, this is great, why don't I get a slightly larger pair so I can see even more. That's just what I did and it's great, so great I'm starting to think I might even want to go bigger but I'm going to play around with these first and learn as much as I can.
I can say that the Orion bins were lighter than I expected. I did appreciate the extra power which was nice as a counter to my old 10x bins but at the same time I got a really good appreciation for how important a wide field of view is and how going over ten power one really needs some kind of mount for terrestrial viewing . However they are light enough to lay down on a reclining chair and just look up at the night sky for quite some time. As for the optics, my first impression were that they were very sharp and colimated. The contrast and brightness was better than my old Baush and Lomb Audubon series which I paid over 200 bucks almost twenty years ago when 200 bucks was a lot of dough. The CA and sharpness were about the same in both binocs. No real obvious color except when you looked at a white bright roof top along the edge. I can live with that. Over and under focus did show nice round circles and that's about as much as I can judge these. I intend to download a CN reports article on judging bins but right now I'm pretty happy with the Orion's and they fit the bill for what I want. Just dying to find out what my next pair will be and how much larger I should go. Wifey loved them so much she actually suggested getting a larger pair........she's such a gem. I'm going to lake Tahoe next week for two nights and excited about seeing what dso's I can see along with saggitarious goodies. Carl

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