Question about 20-60x82mm Sport ED Spotting Scope
Hello,
Is the eyepiece of this scope removable? Will it take normal astronomical eyepieces? What size if so?
Yes, it is removable, however most spotting scopes use a bayonet-type attachment instead of the 1.25″ smooth barrel used by telescope eyepieces. But the supplied 20-60 zoom eyepiece is very good and really all you need, it covers the full usable range.
Regards,
Kevin Busarow
Thank you so much for getting back to me.
While your eyepiece seems very high quality, I’ve got an idea for a unique spotting scope, and am exploring ideas on how to accomplish it. My idea is to create a cheaper version of the Swarovski BTX spotting scope, which has a proprietary binoviewer. It’s great of course, but the whole package for one of those is like $5k. So I’m brainstorming to try to create something similar.
I’m wondering if I had a high quality body, like your 82mm Sport ED, removed the eyepiece, and attached a binoviewer (the ones I’ve found so far seem to be all 1.25 telescope mounts), then attach Baader Hyperion Clickstop Zoom eyepieces. Since those eyepieces have click stop zooms, I wonder if it would work well to peep through one side, find subject, focus, zoom in, and quickly match the other side’s zoom level with the click stops, perhaps even just doing that by feel, never needing to look up.
I have no idea whether this kind of system would work well. Seems to me that if the zoom click stops were off by even a little bit, that that might make the system unpractical. On the other hand, those particular Baader eyepieces are supposedly of high quality.
I’m exploring all options, and have looked through your products. I really like what I see. Your Oberwerk BT-70-45 Binoculars seem really neat. I wonder if the Baader Hyperion Clickstop Zooms would work on those?
I realize you have a company to run, and so I won’t bore you with further long emails. Thank you again,
It’s an interesting idea, but a binoviewer won’t work on the spotting scope for two reasons- the first is the proprietary eyepiece connection, the second is not enough back-focus. I’ve already tested this with a Denkmeier Binotron- even if we managed to attach it, the focus range of the scope is not enough to make it usable. It could work with the addition of a barlow, but this would sacrifice low-power wide-field viewing. However, I do like the Baader Hyperion zoom eyepieces very much, and they work nicely in the BT-70-45. Here’s a review I did-
The Oberwerk BT-70-45 equipped with the Baader eyepieces is definitely the better way to go- it gives you two 70mm objectives (vs. the spotting scope/binoviewer’s single objective with a beam-splitter), for true depth perception and perspective. It’s also much less expensive than cobbling together a high-quality spotting scope and binoviewer.
Regards,
Kevin