Recommend me some decent eyepieces please!

I have been carting my Skywatcher Pro 150 downstairs to the garden on a semi-regular basis for the past 18 months. My star gazing occurs on those rare occasions when the sky is free from cloud and I am free from drink. I never feel like setting up a scope after a few post-prandial cocktails...

But I digress; my query concerns the eyepieces which came supplied with the scope. They are both 1.25"; one is 20mm and the other is 9mm. As they came supplied with the scope I suspect that they are of the cheapest possible provenance. I have had several decent views through them but I wonder if my viewing could be improved by spending an extra few shillings on something a bit more upmarket.

Looking through various magazines reveals prices for these things that are, well, astronomical to say the least. Can anybody recommend an eyepiece which might be an improvement on the supplied ones without breaking the bank? God knows they're broke enough already...

The supplied eyepieces are mostly likely Plossls, which have a moderately narrow field of view (by modern standards, anyway). One of the most pleasing things you could do would be to go up to a 68° apparent field of view.

(There are inexpensive 82° apparent field of view eyepieces, but they have significant drawbacks in terms of image quality. You really need to step up to at least the Meade UWAs or WO UWANs to get decent correction at 82°, but then we're in high-euro territory.)

But at 68°, the Baader Hyperions are well regarded. Some Tele Vue Panoptics would be fab, but a good bit more expensive.

If you're willing to buy used, you can get Tele Vue eyepieces at about 80% of new price on AstroMart, and some other brands with even more markdown. The Orion Stratus are more-or-less the same as the Baader Hyperions but appear more on AstroMart since they're more common in the States.

Cheers,
-- Jeff.

Baader Hyperion very good value for money.

Hi,
If you want good all round cheap eyepieces then meade series 4000 eyepieces are a good choice, you'll get them for half nothing but are limited to a 55 degree field of view.

From experiece can tell you that series 4000 ultra wide field eyepieces are not so expensive on astromart and are optically excellent, apparently the series 5000 ones can be hit and mis depending on who was working on the production line the day they were made.
Cheaper widefield eyepieces usually suffer some sort of image quality defect, its a matter of it been something you can live with, even the expensive naglers suffer from whats called pincussion distortion, some people get motion sickness using them while other dont notice it at all.

I've seen through a few hyperions and they look like great eyepieces, as are the range of celestron eyepieces.

Cheap nasty eyepieces will kill your scope. If you can go to one of your local clubs observing sessions and bring the scope, maybe someone there will swap an eyepiece with you and then you'll know if its worth upgrading the eyepieces.