Televue 7mm Nagler Type 6 1.25 inch (1-1/4 in.) Eyepiece

Best eyepiece I own, you'll have it for life.

Tele Vie are in a class by themselves. They offer the best telescope viewing experience. This is a great eyepiece for planetary/ close up observation. While I don't use the 7MM that often, it's one I will keep and have for life.

I bought this eyepiece for F5 12" Dob. It gives 217x but the same field of view as a standard Plossl at ~140x. Field is sharp throughout. No astigmatism.The eyepiece is easy to use with no blackouts. The eye-relief is reasonable but not huge. You won't see the full field if wearing glasses. Eye-cup is somewhat low and so you can get reflections if observing from a poor location with a bright light nearby. The eyepiece performs very well on deep space objects such as planetary nebulae or globular clusters. I find it's not so hot on planets: the contrast around Jupiter is poor compared to, say, a Radian. I have found this to be the case with other Naglers also, such as the 31mm. As a deep space eyepiece this thing definitely gets 5 stars. For planets you might want to consider something else.After a year of owning this eyepiece, I'd like to update my review. I have found that some of the contrast loss on planets seems to be a funny interaction with my eye and the eye-lens. There were weird back-reflections going on and different observers may well not have this problem (am rather myopic). I have tried this eyepiece on Jupiter with an 18" f/4 and found that it performed very well indeed at 300x when the seeing will support this. Back-reflections are gone with this scope.

This review is based on many years of experience with plenty of unc Al's glass. While I am very impressed with the other examples of Tele Vue eyepieces in my eyepiece case, the 7mm T6 was probably the worst eyepiece I've used since graduating from Ramsden eyepieces back in the 1970's. Sure, it has a super wide field of view. Contrast and sharpness were both just awful. Perhaps I had a defective example. The difference in clarity between the 9mm T6 and 7mm T6 was stark and obvious. Others I observe with agreed with me based on other examples of the 7mm.I hope you have better luck.

If you're looking for an eyepiece with long eye relief, a HUGE field of view and some serious magnification, it is pretty much impossible to beat this eyepiece. Views are tack sharp from edge to edge and the apparent field of view is spectacular. I don't know how Al Nagler did it, but I suspect that at least 1 of the 3 pounds of this eyepiece is from the weight of pixie dust.I know this is an expensive eyepiece, but if you get it, you really only need a wide-field eyepiece to compliment it. You won't want to look through anything else after looking through this one. It's that good.