Omegon wide-field Binoculars 2.1x, 42 mm aperture

Omegon wide-field Binoculars - wide field of view for night observation

The look at the sky becomes an special experience. At the beginning, the 2.1x magnification is not apparent, but where the unaided eye shows only a few stars, you will find yourself in a sea of stars. The number of stars increases up to ten times of the number visible to the naked eye. Extensive nebula regions suddenly become visible in their natural size. The Andromeda galaxy, hard to make out with the unaided eye, shows its entire size of about two degrees. You can lose yourself totally in the milky way.

When observing with the binoculars, one does not have the impression of looking through binoculars. The impression is more like an eyesight intensifier The starry sky appears brighter, nebula regions become visible, you get deeper into the sky.

The optics of the Omegon bino:

The base of the binoculars are opera glasses with Galilean optics. Omitting the erecting prisms results in surprisingly contrasty optics with a large and bright image and a huge field of view of 26° at night time, according to the manufacturer. This allows to observe complete constellations or regions of the milky way with dark clouds.

The field of view of Galileian telescopes varies with the pupil diameter of the observer, so a practical test at daylight, with narrow pupils, has shown only 21°.

The optical design of the bino consists of two extremely fast objectives (2-element meniscus objective system) and two eyepieces produced especially for this huge field of view. Stars are dot-like over the entire field.

Basically the field of view of Galilean opera glasses with their divergent eyepieces is very small. The only way to widen it is to use extremely fast (f/2 or faster) objective lenses. For this reason, the bino has 42 mm aperture, despite the calculation for Keplerian systems results in an exit pupil of 42 mm / 2,1 = 20 mm - far too oversized for the human eye.

Actually, the exit pupil of this bino equals the diameter of the eye pupil of the observer, and the entrance pupil is 2.3 times as large. If one´s eye has 7 mm pupil diameter in the dark, the entrance pupil will have 2.1 * 7 mm = 14.7 mm diameter.

Note: A Galilean telescope system has no eye-relief. The best way to see the widest field of view is to "press" your eyes as close as possible to the eyepieces. When wearing eyeglasses, the field of view may be reduced. With very strong eyeglass prescriptions with stronger than -6 diopter, it may not be possible to reach the infinity focus. In such cases, wearing contact lenses is recommended.