The pocket Borg arrived today,rather interesting results. When using a 15mm Altair wide angle eyepiece and star diagonal it became a huge microscope, magnifying parts of the window I was looking through including marks on the glass. Yet when used as a through and through this doesn't happen. I'd guess the 15 mm lense is giving a magnification of about 14x?due to the long days at this time of year I've not had the chance to try it on any astronomical objects. I also tried a 9mm possil lense by celestron but eye relief was a problem, there wasn't any!I'm guessing that the star diagonal is somehow changing the focal length and thus causing the close ups?the moon will be coming into phase soon giving me a large object to try it on.not having any solar filter film available at my present location the sun is out.

 

No the Borg works fine as a through and through so it can't be the scope or eye piece. Only thing could be the star diagonal? I reckon that it is something to do with the length it has to focus in?whilst a star diagonal doesn't, I don't think?, alter focal length of a telescope it could alter the way in which a scope focusses? I could try adding a Barlow lenses to the star diagonal and see the result. Although I'm jumping the gun a bit as I haven't actually looked at the night sky with it yet!

 

No as I only have the one diagonal. They are fairly simple, I wouldn't have thought that much could go wrong with them,erecting prisms close relatives of star diagonals,are a bit more complex. In truth you don't really need star diagonals unless objects are high up plus when you only have a 25mm lense the diagonal will lose a bit more light but perhaps I'm being a bit like the fox with the grapes as I can't get it to work!

 

Solved the problem! Added a 3x Barlow lenses to the pocket Borg then the star diagonal and it focused! About the only review, scope reviews,of the pocket Borg did suggest that it worked best using eyepieces with built in Barlows lenses.these tend to be the very expensive nagler type eyepieces.

 

9mm would give a tight view out of a 25mm objective but the built in Barlow should give more eye relief.

 

....but the 25mm is uncharted territory, well not historically as early astronomers used telescopes far inferior to the pocket Borg in fact much of the southern skies where charted from cape town using a 13.5mm pocket telescope, and it's hard to know what type of powers it would bear.reports suggest up to 70x but best stick to 30x and below. I have quite some experience with 25mm optics as about 5 years ago I bought an Opticron trailfinder monocular 8x25 for travel, hiking,etc..I find that I can just get m101 on a dark transparent night,m51 is easier.I'll sort of sit on the fence with m82,m1,I think that the 8x25 can do them but with faint things your mind fills in the gaps when you know where the gaps are?likewise m32 and m101 I'm on the fence.I did however get m66 a few weeks back but not m65 or the NGC galaxy near them.the bigger 10x42 monocular brings out m65 but still not the NGC one.theoretically anything that the 8x25 can do the Borg should be able to do but better due to lenses quality, not going through roof prisms and the ability to switch magnification. Looking forward to trying it but a bad time of year,such long nights!

 

I experimented with the pocket Borg last night looking north and used it as a through and through hand held telescope using a 15mm wide field Altair possil eyepieces. For comparison I had my Zeiss 5x10,Opticron 8x25 and Viking 10x42 monoculars to hand.yes I think that eyepiece gives something around 12x in the Borg. The field of view a bit less than the 8x25 monocular but not much less. The stars where quite focused to a point with no flare and it was quite easy to hold still but the inverted image makes it hard to steer through the sky by hand however tripod mounted I don't think that would be a problem. Think is it's about 3 times as long as the 8x25 monocular! Pocket Borg? You'd need big pockets!the only true pocket one of the bunch is the 5x10 Zeiss, as even the 8x25 is fairly big for coat pockets but OK for backpacking.the moon will be the test of the Borg soon.