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build special closed-circuit television monitors and cameras for simulators used in the Apollo program, the company originally made projection lenses for large projection-screen televisions, but is well known in the astronomy community for its lines of "Radian," "Panoptic," "Nagler" and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, but the real reason for wide fields of view is to allow the same true field of view as is found in a lower power, narrower FOV eyepiece. This increases effective contrast and aids in visibility of certain details. Additionally, Tele Vue eyepieces are well corrected for most aberrations, providing edge to edge pinpoint stars, and are well suited to use in popular "fast" telescopes.

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) Newtonian 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 127mm (5 inches). At the 2007 Northeast Astronomy Forum (NEAF) in Suffern, NY, Tele Vue introduced new 13mm eyepiece that will yield a 100° apparent field of view. Called the "Ethos," this eyepiece, actually a collection of different eyepiece designs, will allow larger field of view as favored by large Dobsonian telescope owners, and at the same time (in light of the introduction of the Series 5000 Ultra Wide Angle eyepiece system by Meade), will allow the company to both stay competitive and in many ways reinvent the way eyepieces are manufactured, much like the 13mm Nagler did in the 1980s.

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 principal distributor, Vixen America still maintains its address at Tele Vue's New York location.