Orion Stratus 13mm #2

I bought this eyepiece shortly before Christmas in 2005. It was intended to give me a higher quality eyepiece for use in my very fast F/4 SN-10 Schmidt Newt with decent eye relief. I must wear glasses to observe with this scope, due to the large exit pupils it produces. The Stratus line is advertised as having 20mm of eye relief and is touted to work very well in fast scopes. I decided to give the 13mm a try, being a good replacement for a 14mm W70 I was selling at the time. My Stratus arrived in a very well padded box with big ORION lettering on the sides. Took about a week for it to get here. I eagerly dove in to the box and was greeted by a large imitation leather bag containing a fairly heavy hand grenade sized eyepiece. The build quality appears to be pretty good, and typical of Orion marketed eyepieces. This eyepiece is pretty much a direct clone of the Vixen Lanthanum Superwide, both in appearance and mechanical design. I do not know what kind of glass is used, but I am sure it is not Lanthanum. It has a 1.25" barrel attached, but also has a flat section machined into the housing that will fit a 2" focuser barrel, but does not have much to grab onto and looks a bit less than adequate. The eyepiece I recieved was a bit disappointing, as it had a large chunk of crud sandwiched between two interior lenses. I decided to send it back to Orion using their generous return policy. They had a replacement in the mail and shipping before I even sent the defective eyepiece. I have nothing but praise for their customer service. I have heard it through the grapevine that it is not uncommon to get a Stratus with a defect like this. I can only guess their quality control is not as great as it should be, but the no questions asked return policy makes it easy to correct. I was back in business with a spotless new Stratus after another short wait. I could not wait, so I set up my scope in the yard and took a look at the moon in the daylight. This would show black-out problems very easily. The moon was very impressive, being flat and sharp from edge to edge, with very little false color noticeable. A little blackout was noticeable, but it was not intrusive at all. I was a little disappointed by the eye relief. It may have 20mm of relief, but there is a large metal ridge that takes up a lot of this space. I have to force my glasses all the way down to the edge of the rolled down eyecup in order to see the whole field. Not at all like the 20mm of relief I experienced with the Orion ED series, but it is still passable. I just wish it had a little more. Later on that night I took it out under the stars. After letting my scope cool down for several hours I took a gander at a few of the brighter Messier objects and some clusters. I will not go into detail about the individual performance on each object, but will say the performance was more than adequate. The eye relief, while tight was definitely useable, and the image it projected was reasonably flat and sharp. This eyepiece does work very well in fast scopes, but it is not perfect. I could see a bit of curvature/unsharpness near the extreme edge, but you have to look for it. This eyepiece has pretty good contrast too, much better than I am used to seeing. I got the 13mm as it is about the best combination of magnification and focal length for bringing out faint detail in deep sky objects with my scope. I have no real complaints about the optical performance of this eyepiece - just don't expect it to perform like the ones with the green writing on the side. For what it is, it is very good. I tested it out with a 3x ED barlow on Saturn. It is not really designed to be a planetary eyepiece, but WOW! It literally gave me the best view of Saturn I have ever seen. The color was right on, and the planet appeared to be just sort of hanging there in space. Every now and then I would see a few wispies of bad air, but overall it was very steady and clear. I love using this eyepiece with this barlow. It definitely gives a better view than my 6mm BO/TMB Planetary with this barlow combination. I can only imagine what the 5mm version is like without the barlow. The only drawback was the large potato masher grenade sticking out of my scope with this thing in place in the barlow. Overall, this has become one of my best eyepieces, though in reality I don't use it as often as the smaller ones. It is just a bit on the big size. I had plans to get an additional 21mm, and an 8mm, though I do not think I will at this point. Baader markets the Hyperion line in direct competition with the Stratus. It is threaded for digital photography adapters and is a bit better made, without the annoying cast metal eye ring. In all they are the same eyepiece with some improvements in build quality. They are priced roughly similar, so I will most likely be buying Hyperions the next time around. I need to check on their return policy though...

Pros

Nice contrast
nice flat field, little curvature
optically very sharp
cheap price for high quality eyepiece
very generous return policy

Cons

BIG and HEAVY!
some field curvature near the extreme edge (not much though)
eye relief shorter than expected
possible quality control issues

Rating