Meade zoom eyepiece

[CEtherington]

Good evening.
I am thinking about getting a zoom eyepiece. Any thoughts? Plus points or bad points. I was annoyed that my images from yesterday had so many splodges and marks on them. To be fair I have only 'inexpensive' and 2nd hand plossls, so they won't be perfect. I'm thinking of spoiling myself with this Meade...
series 4000. 8mm-24mm zoom.

[bbones]

Zoom eyepieces are ok however I believe your better off getting individual eyepieces to suit your observing and perhaps a focal reducer as I believe your using a MAK127.

To get an idea of what you can see is to use Stellarium and set up your Scope and try different focal length eyepieces in the Ocular view. This will provide you the FOV with your or any Scope and different Eyepieces and Focal reducer

Hope this helps

[DRatledge]

Bill is right - zoom eyepieces are best avoided. We have one for our Coronado solar scope but this works ok because there is only a single wavelength for it to focus - not a range of colours.
With your long focal length nearly all eyepieces will work well. I recall Brian had a wide angle erfle on his mak and that worked fine. Zoom eyepieces tend to have narrow fields of view - not desirable with long focal length scopes.

[CEtherington]

Thanx for that. I shall instead treat my self to new single ( or maybe a set) of eyepieces.