Telescopes and Corrective Eye Glasses

When looking through a telescope what is better, naked eye or corrective Eye Glasses?

My usual answer is to keep your corrective Eye Glasses on.  Corrective / Prescription Eye Glasses correct for distance and astigmatism.  All images in a telescope are at infinity.  The telescope can be focused to compensate for individual distance vision differences.  Telescopes cannot correct for astigmatism.  Astigmatism warps circles into ellipses and points of light into short lines. You best view will be with your glasses on.

In Group viewing, keep your corrective Eye Glasses on as a courtesy to others to keep the line moving.

Each person should focus the telescope for viewing. Small vision variances in the dark can cause blurred views in the telescope.  To minimize focus changes, keep corrective eye glasses on.  Also, if you have astigmatism, it will be corrected by your eye glasses and produce high quality views.  Removing your corrective eye glasses can require major changes in the focus of the telescope and cause major delays as you focus and the succeeding person having to make large adjustments as well.

Star Gaze Hawaii uses Eyepieces designed for keeping corrective Eye Glasses on while viewing.

All of our selected eyepieces are rated for about 20 mm of spacing between your eye and the lenses.  This is the widely accepted distance for Eye Glass use with the eyepiece.  Many of our eyepieces are wide angle and allow you to look around through them.  They are purported to be Spacewalk experience or Spaceship porthole type of views.  If the crowd is small, you may remove your corrective lenses, refocus and try to get that Spacewalk view.  I wear corrective Eye Glasses and always keep them on.  I do not feel that I am losing anything by not removing them.