A great low power wide field eyepiece that i added to my collection. It’s a very well corrected piece of glass that produces clear bright images. First class service from FLO again.

Ordered a StellaLyra 30mm UFF from FLO last week, and it arrived by express courier the next day, and since than have been able to try it out a couple times through my 14 in Newtonian, and overall quite impressed. As mentioned in another thread, I have been looking for some time for a low power wide field eyepiece that is both not excessively bulky and heavy, and will be sharp to the edges of the field of view in an f5 instrument, and the StellaLyra 30 mm UFF comes close to achieving both these aims. At 550g (not including lens caps, 570g with) it is no lightweight, but this is about 2/3rds of that of my ES 24 mm 82 degree eyepiece or 35mm Panoptic, and about half that of a 31mm Nagler, or a 30 mm ES 82 degree.

Although the star images at the edge of the field of view through my f5 Newtonian were by no means perfect, they were noticeably superior to those in my ES 24 mm 82 degree eyepiece, and vastly superior to my 36 mm Baader Hyperion Aspheric. Although in the case of the former I was comparing an APFOV about 15% smaller, one thing I liked about the StellaLyra was that it had a sharply defined edge compared to the rather mushy edge of the ES 82 degree, and the whole of the field of view was immediately visible, as opposed to having to move the eye around in the case of the latter.

If anything the claimed 70 degree APFOV of the StellaLyra was a bit on the modest side, holding the two eyepieces side by side, the APFOV was noticeably larger than that of my 24mm Panoptic, similar to that of my 36mm 72 degree Hyperion Aspheric, and very close to that of my 17.5 mm 76 degree Morpheus. Before purchasing I was a bit worried that the actual APFOV might be significantly smaller that that claimed, as was the case with a StellaLyra 50mm Superview eyepiece that I once owned, which originally claimed to have an APFOV of 60 degrees, but turned out to be only around 45 degrees. With hindsight, I don't think that it is actually possible to produce a 50mm eyepiece with a 60 degree (or greater) APFOV in a 2in barrel.

Furthermore at £179 (from FLO) the 30 mm StellaLyra UFF, although not cheap and having a smaller APFOV, is quite modestly priced being just over half that of a 30 mm ES 82 degree, or 1/4 that of a 30 mm Nagler.

John