Televue
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Tele Vue Optics is a Chester, New York-based astronomical optics company known primarily for its premium brand of speciality eyepieces and apochromatic refractor telescopes.
Founded in 1977 by Al Nagler, an optical engineer from The Bronx who helped build special closed-circuit television monitors and cameras for simulators used in the Apollo program, the company originally made projection lenses for large projection-screen televisions, but is well known in the astronomy community for its line of "Radian," "Panoptic," "Nagler" and "Nagler Zoom" eyepieces. Using different combinations of lenses of different types of glass, the eyepieces produce, respectively, a 60°, 68°, 82° and 50° apparent field-of-view. Tele Vue calls the 82° apparent field-of-view a "spacewalk" experience. Wider apparent fields of view are helpful in viewing galaxies and nebulae, especially large emission nebulae like the Orion Nebula.
Tele Vue also manufactures Plossl (50° field-of-view) eyepieces, as well as special nebula filters, barlow lenses, the "Paracorr" coma-corrector for "fast" (f/5 and below) telescopes, and the new "Dioptrix," a special lens that snaps over eyepieces to correct astigmatism. Tele Vue's apochromatic refractor telescopes, which have reduced chromatic aberration, come in diameters ranging from 60mm (2.4 inches) to 125mm (5 inches).
Prior to October 1, 2006, Tele Vue's corporate headquarters has also served as the primary distribution point for Vixen America, a subsidiary of the Japan-based Vixen corporation, with the two companies building equipment that are compatible with each other, especially the Tele Vue refractor with Vixen's "sphinx" "go-to" mount. Although the company is no longer the principle distributer, Vixen America still maintains its address at Tele Vue's New York location.
