Meade 4000 Plossl 9.7mm

Manufacturer data:
- 4 element
- Fold down soft rubber eyeguard
- Parfocal with other series 4000 eyepieces
- 9.7mm Focal length
- 52 degrees field of view
- 7 layer multi coating
- 1.25" barrel

Now onto the review:
The thing that stands out the most is the small lens, most people prefer big lenses even at these focal lengths, it's just more comfortable looking through them.

Image quality (7/10)
This an excellent planetary eyepiece, with 52 degrees FOV, it provides a large field of view even at high magnification. Of course it can't compete with Naglers or some Pentax eyepieces or even with some Meade eyepieces, but at this price (around $50) it can't be beat. Spherical aberration is not present, probably thanks to the 7 layer multi coating. Images are sharp edge to edge when looking at stars and planets.

Comfort (7/10)
Eye relief is *very* short, at this focal length it's 4mm! (Eye relief gets longer on other longer focal length eyepieces). It does have a foldable rubber guard for eyeglass wearers! I give this EP a 7 out of 10.

Space objects
Saturn was bright but clear, unlike Jupiter (see below), I could clearly see details, The Cassini division was clearly there, very dark, I could also see rings A & B (those are the outer rings, the Cassini division is between them), I could see 3 moons. Saturn was simply gorgeous, I could gaze at it for a very long time.

The Moon was stunning. I think the Moon is beautiful in any eyepiece, but through the Meade Series 4000, details are crisp, but it is bright when full. This eyepiece provides bright view, for bright object, I would recommend a filter.

Jupiter wasn't as good as expected, it was very bright and couldn't make out many belts. I should have used a filter to better appreciate the view.

Milky Way
I sometimes like to point my telescope towards the Milky Way and star hop. This eyepiece makes it somewhat easy, it has a somewhat large field of view and views are bright, so you can see double stars, star clusters, it is a nice eyepiece to to star hopping with.

Finally I'd like to say that I recommend this eyepiece to anyone, it is inexpensive and well worth it. It isn't a Nagler or Panoptic, but it really is a good eyepiece for the price.

Telescopes used:
- Orion 100mm ED
- Celestron C8N

I am fortunate to own two scopes. Both telescopes yielded very nice images using this eyepiece, I used the Orion for DSOs and the Celestron for Planetary objects.

Pros

1) Inexpensive
2) Clear and clean views
3) Large FOV
4) Comfortable eye relief

Cons

1) Small lens

Rating

-- End of review