Zeiss Victory Harpia
85mm Scope Review
I’ve had readers write and ask why
I don’t review spotting scopes. Often the answer surprises them: it’s not some
disdain for terrestrial viewing, but a lack of time and money. Actually, I’ve
long wanted to try out a really good spotter for astronomy.
So when the
opportunity arose to test Zeiss’ latest and best scope - the Harpia – I jumped
at it. I’ve tested the Harpia the way I usually do bino’s, but for astronomy
like a telescope too. Read on to find out how a premium scope fares when taken
outside its comfort zone on the night sky...
At A Glance
|
Magnification |
22-65x zoom |
|
Objective Size |
85mm |
|
Eye Relief |
13mm measured, but feels like 15-16mm with my specs, see
below. |
|
Actual
Field of View |
63.2
– 21.0 m / 1000m |
|
Apparent field of view |
72° |
|
Close focus |
~3.2m |
|
Transmissivity |
88% |
|
Length |
~420mm with eyepiece and lens
shield retracted. |
|
Weight |
1935g w/o eyepiece |
Data from Zeiss/Me.
What’s in the Box?
The Victory Harpia gets a long,
thin version of Zeiss’ premium Victory binocular box, with a magnetic catch, a
thick foam lining and ... a huge image of a Harpy Eagle (of course!)
Zeiss’ Victory packaging now has a uniform style.
All you get in the box is the Harpia ...
... the Harpia eyepiece is sold as an accessory.
Design and Build
Zeiss currently have two lines of spotting scopes – Victory Harpia
and Gavia. The Harpia comes in 95mm and 85mm apertures and is Zeiss’ premium
scope, part of a range of top-end German-made products under the ‘Victory’
label. The Gavia comes under the mid-price Conquest sub-brand and is made in
Japan.
Zeiss have thrown everything at the Harpia, including multiple
FL glass elements, to create a cutting-edge scope with a broad zoom range, an
extremely close near focus and a wide field of view at all magnifications.
The technology to deliver such a leading range of abilities
doesn’t come cheap, though: the eyepiece alone is more than many mid-priced
scopes. That said, plenty of other brands – not all as prestigious as Zeiss – do
sell scopes in the Harpia’s price range.
If you’re used to scopes from those other brands, the Harpia
has an unusual feature. Zoom control is on the body, not the eyepiece, so there
is currently only one eyepiece available for both 85mm and 95mm models.
Zeiss Harpia is part of a range of premium products under the
‘Victory’ label (here with 10x42 Victory SFs).
The Harpia isn’t much larger or heavier than this 60mm astro’
scope (a Takahashi FOA-60).
The cheaper, Japan-made Gavia 85 for comparison.
Body
First impressions? I was surprised at how small and light the
Harpia 85 is, much lighter than my Tele Vue 85 for example, at just under 2 Kg.
Despite this, it’s actually quite a bit heavier and longer than the Gavia 85
(see above). Still, pulling it from its foam-lined box, the Harpia felt almost
insubstantial compared to a typical Astro’ telescope.
Zeiss are coy about what the Harpia is made of for some
reason, but given how light it is I’m guessing either a reinforced composite
like the old FL range of binoculars, or perhaps magnesium like the Gavia.
Used as I am to astronomical telescopes from the likes of
Tele Vue, Takahashi and Astro Physics, the Harpia’s outward appearance seemed
almost ... well, a little plasticky really, whilst also feeling much more like
a mass-market consumer product (a camera maybe) than most telescopes I review.
Closer inspection reveals excellent fit and finish, though, with
smooth black armour on top and a nicely textured area at the back/bottom for
grabbing the scope to move it about. I did notice that the smooth part of the
armour is quite prone to nail scratches and marking.
At the front is a sliding dew-shield/sun-shade that clicks
out with a refined and smooth action. At the other end is a port with a bayonet
fitting for the eyepiece, with an optical component (prism or possibly lens)
sealed into the base of it, so there’s no way for water or dust to enter the
scope body.
Despite its light weight, the Harpia is nitrogen filled and
waterproof to 400 mbar, same as their binoculars (and the cheaper Gavia too). I
didn’t test it to that degree, but it survived heavy rain with no problems.
Surprisingly, this turned out to be a great feature for astronomy: in showery
weather I wasn’t worried about leaving the Harpia out.
Focuser
The
Harpia’s focuser is unusual, at least for me, so I’ll go into some detail for
any other Zeiss scope neophytes out there.
The
focuser is the broader of the two deeply-ribbed rings that encircle the scope
at the back, the narrower one behind it being the 3x zoom control.
The
focuser has a dual-speed feature built into the single ring: large movements
make coarse focus shifts and smaller movements fine ones. The fine focus part
has a very light touch indeed and very fine adjustment. When you reach the
coarse part of the focuser travel, you feel a slight ‘bump’ in the action and
the action becomes heavier as coarse focus engages.
This two-speed
mechanism mostly works well by day, and the snappy optics do really need a fine
focus to nudge them in.
Especially
at night, though, and sometimes during the day too, I found the dual-speed function
made the focuser frustrating to use: I’d
focus through then back up, only for the focus point to have moved because I’d
gone through the fine/coarse threshold without realising it. There’s a definite
learning curve here.
There
seems to be quite a lot of focus travel, but that’s because close focus is a
simply outstanding feature of the Harpia – I measured 3.2m across the whole
zoom range (Zeiss conservatively claim 3.5m), at which it is absolutely tack
sharp across the field. Wow. It’s a fabulous feature and allows the Harpia to
function as a long-distance microscope.
I left
the Harpia out for some hours in temperatures around freezing, to see if the
focuser and/or zoom would stiffen up. They didn’t.
Focuser is the wider front ring, 3x zoom control behind,
twist to the left to zoom in.
Optics - Objectives
The fixed part of the objective appears to be a triplet
comprising a single front element of crown glass, with a large air gap and then
a cemented crown/flint doublet behind. I guess that the two crowns are premium ED
glass: Zeiss claim “FL glasses and other specially
formulated glass types”. It’s interesting to note that the cheaper Gavia also
has “HD Optics” and two crown elements, but is not as perfectly corrected for
false colour.
Well behind the Harpia’s objective proper are a focusing lens
and then a separate zoom lens assembly. It’s a complex optical system.
The zoom control varies the objective’s effective focal
length between about 165mm and 486mm (the eyepiece F.L. is fixed at 7.48mm),
giving a focal ratio between F1.94 and F5.7.
~F2
is crazy fast by astro’ telescope standards, but false colour isn’t the problem
you expect because it’s only that fast at the lowest power of 22x. At the top
end, 65x in a F5.7 triplet doesn’t sound too challenging – familiar astro’
scope territory.
The pinkish T* coatings (a Zeiss trademark for almost a
century) are very transparent and give an excellent overall transmission of 88%.
The coatings also include Zeiss’ LotuTecTM
water-repellent treatment that sheds rain and makes it easier to wipe
away fingerprints.
In terms of stray light protection, the tube is painted matt black
inside and has two knife-edge baffles, one immediately behind the objective.
The lens ring is micro-ridge-baffled against veiling flare; but with the hood
extended, flare shouldn’t be a problem anyway.
Zeiss’ signature T* coatings compared with a recent Canon/Optron lens (in a Takahashi FOA-60).
Look past the coatings to see the baffles and complex
internals for the focuser and zoom optics.
Optics – Eyepiece
Unlike
some other scopes, the Harpia shares a single fixed-focal-length (7.48mm) eyepiece
with the 95mm model. The eyepiece is quite large and has a huge (31mm
diameter), flat eye lens.
The
eyepiece secures to the scope via a twist-lock bayonet fitting with solid metal
blades that holds it very securely. You have to press in a button to twist and
remove it. A trivial gripe is that the alignment dot is positioned between two
of the bayonet blades and so hard to spot.
The
downside of the integrated eyepiece approach is that you’re stuck with one
eyepiece (at present anyway), whether you like its characteristics or not. This
feels odd to a consumer of astro’ eyepieces. The big advantage is that the zoom control is much larger and more
convenient than it could be if the eyepiece zoomed (much easier with gloves).
The zoom
magnification range, 22-65x on the Harpia 85, is quite generous for a spotting
scope. But if you’re not an astronomer, look away, because I have to point out
that using interchangeable eyepieces in an 85mm astro’ scope would give a
usable magnification range of ~10x to 200x (but with other limitations, of
course).
The
eyepiece is expensive for a non-zoom item. At around £500, well into Tele Vue
Ethos territory, but with much less glass (and field width too). Here, the
field is 72° - only moderately wide by astro’ eyepiece
standards (which offer up to 110°), but the zoom maintains it
across the whole range – both unusual and
impressive (and a key difference with the Gavia).
Eye
relief measures roughly 13mm from the rim of the eye cup and seems to maintain
it across the zoom range. For those who view without glasses, the eye cup
twists out and extends.
The
eyepiece is not all good, though. The field isn’t perfectly corrected – sharp
to the edge, it has rather more pin-cushion distortion than I’m used to in a
telescope, presumably to avoid the globe effect when panning.
More
problematic for me is the increase in false colour off axis, which is quite
pronounced in high-contrast views, even at low power.
Interestingly,
the Harpia’s optics are not locked in to this eyepiece - experiments with a
Nagler (an 80° astro’ eyepiece) gave an excellent view.
However, though the Gavia has a 1.25” astro’ eyepiece adapter for its bayonet
fitting, the Harpia does not (at least that I can find).
Mounting
The Harpia has a
built-in mounting ring. The tube can be rotated in the ring, having loosened a
lock knob on the right side, in order to change the eyepiece angle (very handy
for astronomy). It rotates smoothly, with click-stops and a refined weighty
feel.
Attached to the ring is a mounting shoe that can function as
a dovetail, but also has a standard ¼ - 20 thread for tripod mounting as an
insert in a 3/8 thread.
I mounted the Harpia on a light Berlebach
ash tripod with a matching head that took the Harpia’s size and weight
perfectly, look good in a domestic setting (watching the boats sail by from
your cliff-top hideaway maybe?), competing with Swarovski’s similarly-spec’d
ATX Interior at a slightly lower price.
For serious field use, you might choose a carbon tripod and a
heavier scope-specific head.
The Harpia 85 is
compact enough to fit in a domestic setting.
Accessories
No case, or even objective cap, is provided. The eyepiece
does come with a cap on a lanyard, though. You can buy a quality stay-on case
as an accessory.
In Use – Daytime
Ergonomics
Eyepiece comfort is good with no troublesome blackouts, with
or without specs. I can see all of the field with specs on, but only if I really push my
specs into the eye cup, otherwise I lose a lot of the field.
Often
the Harpia seems parfocal across its zoom range, an impressive feature. But
puzzlingly, sometimes it is not. At first, I thought I was brushing the focuser
ring whilst zooming, something that’s all too easy with numb fingers or gloves.
But at other times I definitely didn’t brush the focuser ring and yet the focus
point still shifted, usually when zooming in.
The Harpia is so compact and light, it’s not an issue to just
pick it up and carry it on a tripod. But, as I pointed out before, for extreme
portability you might choose the Gavia 85, which is smaller and lighter still.
The View
The view is typical of Zeiss at their best: bright, very high
in resolution, with a cool-yet-natural colour balance that I particularly like;
and sharp to the edge in a way that Zeiss binoculars are not (see below).
Optical quality is extremely high, esp. for a prismatic, zoom
system. Plumage is delivered in startling, almost iMax
fidelity: pin sharp and vivid.
Brightness is subjectively at binocular levels at low power
(very similar to the 10x42 SFs I’m testing at the same time, in fact), when the
Harpia’s exit pupil is binocular wide. So, at 22x, I can enjoy bride-white
snowdrops pushing up through the leaf litter of my local copse on a very cloudy
and dim day in late winter.
However, at 65x, daytime brightness does drop off a lot, both
centre-field and slightly more at the edges. This is an observation not a
criticism, but it does impact dusk viewing, see below.
Focus snap is the kind of absolute you only get with really
excellent optics of any type. However, at the full 3x zoom (65x magnification),
the Harpia does have a very shallow depth of field and a tiny focusing sweet
spot, an absolute point: now, you really need that fine focuser (and
ideally a very stable tripod) to find it.
1x zoom - 22x magnification.
3x zoom – 65x magnification.
Flat field?
As I noted
above, the field is proverbially tack sharp edge-to-edge, even at minimum focus
distance and maximum zoom, confirmed by viewing a meter rule 3m away.
There
is, however, quite a bit of pin cushion distortion, probably to allow
comfortable panning. Even so, panning does create some ‘rolling ball’ effect,
more so than the Gavia, presumably due to the wider field.
Chromatic Aberration
My
standard test of focusing through branches silhouetted against a bright but
cloudy sky reveals almost zero false colour from the objective. The Harpia is
significantly better than the Gavia in this respect.
I
usually do this test at 100x, but it’s still impressive at 65x - better than a
Tele Vue TV-85, for example, with just a slight tinge of green one side, purple
the other.
But considered
as an integrated system with the eyepiece, it’s not as perfect. There is
lateral colour both off-axis and when moving eye position, sometimes quite a
lot.
What does
this mean in practice? Watching a crow in silhouette, at any power, it’s
impossible to avoid some false colour fringing where black feather meets sky.
This
snap reveals the Harpia’s pin-cushion distortion and lateral false colour.
In Use – Dusk
The Harpia 85 is bright at lower powers and works well into
dusk. You could enjoy excellent 22x views in woodland right into early
twilight. Veiling flare under a brilliant dusk sky is a non-issue with the
sun-shade extended.
However, zooming in to view waders – Curlews and
Oystercatchers - far out on the bay sands at twilight makes me realise that for
high-power use at dusk, or for lower powers in deep twilight, you’d really need
the Harpia 95.
In Use – Observing the Night Sky
General Observing Notes
One of my main goals in testing the Harpia was to see how a
premium birding scope performs for astronomy, so I’ll spend some time going
into detail. Just skip this section if you’re not interested!
Although
the field shows some pincushion distortion (perhaps to enable non-emetic
panning), stars remain points until the last few percent when a just a little
astigmatism creeps in that wasn’t apparent by day.
Star
testing a spotting scope isn’t really fair. Nonetheless, the star test looked
good, with nice rings one side and slightly fainter ones the other. However,
the in-focus Airy disk showed slight flare to one side, suggestive of very
subtle misalignment. Again, this is no fault in a spotting scope.
One unexpected issue was that the maximum field of 4° sometimes made finding fainter targets challenging without a
finder, more so than with binoculars that share your naked-eye line of sight. Still,
the Harpia is much better than the Gavia, which has only 1.9° maximum at its lowest power.
That two-speed focuser, which mostly works well by day, occasionally
made perfect focus seem vague and un-snappy (it isn’t). Another comfort issue
was with the fixed, 45° eyepiece angle, which isn’t ideal
for viewing near the zenith.
On the positive side, the ability to zoom in without swapping
eyepieces turned out to be a great feature for astronomy.
Snap of the Moon taken through the Harpia at 65x with an
iPhone X.
The Moon
A thick
crescent Moon just before first quarter was a perfect, crisp and sharp world at
65x, with no false colour even focusing through the limb. Light bleed into the dark space around was low
too. A really wonderful view and a genuine surprise for me, but only after a
few minutes of cooldown – just like any astro’ scope!
The Moon’s
rugged topography, revealed in hard contrasty whites and greys, included a lot
of detail – the slumped walls of crater Catherina near the terminator; the
crater-filled southern highlands. Rima Ariadaeus cutting a black line of shadow
through the highland terrain south of Mare Serenitatis, where a line of peaks
south of crater Silberschlag (a German astronomer)
were sending long and spiky dawn shadows westwards.
Later in
the lunation, the day before full Moon, I enjoyed viewing the stripes in
Aristarchus’ walls, ghostly Reiner Gamma, the central peak in nearby Marius and
the peak in Pythagoras too, right on the terminator. Comparison with a perfect
60mm astro’-scope (Takahashi’s FOA-60) at 100x magnification suggested that
resolved detail was much the same.
I would be
very happy to use the Harpia myself for exploring the Moon. Is the view as good
as a fine astronomical refractor? No, but it’s quite close.
Mars
The Red
Planet at the end of an opposition period was the only planet around and only
~7 arcsecs in apparent size, a challenge for any telescope.
At 65x I
was able to focus Mars into a tiny gibbous disk with a hint of a marking (just
a dark speck) within it. I checked my app to be sure. I’d got lucky and hit a
time when the most obvious surface feature, Syrtis Major, was in view.
But Mars
was sloughing off a lot of stray light into the seeing, a sign of optics that
struggle with its long wavelengths and something I’ve seen before – no issue,
this is a spotting scope, after all.
Near an
opposition I’d expect the Harpia to show surface markings on Mars – remarkable
for a telescope with so much optical complexity.
Deep Sky
Despite
a maximum field of view of 4° at 22x,
the Harpia still frames a lot of larger clusters nicely. The Pleiades fitted
perfectly in the field at 22x and looked their best – misty diamonds on velvet,
just the way a fine astronomical refractor shows them. But I would have liked
to zoom out to a slightly lower power.
Later in
the night, the Beehive cluster showed its main stars as glittering pinpoints to
the field edge, as only a fine refactor can, but went deeper to show masses of
embedded fainter stars too.
The
chain of clusters, M35 to M38, running up through Auriga, were properly
resolved into starbursts at this aperture, likewise the Double Cluster and
nearby Stock 2 and the Owl Cluster, sweeping from Perseus to Cassiopeia.
The
Orion Nebula was a lovely sight, with sweeping arms of nebulosity and some
whorls and clumps in the bright inner region: much the same view as through a
Tele Vue 85. The field of view at 22x easily encompassed the whole of Orion’s
belt, with lots of brilliantly sharp stars filling the field.
Zooming
in on big and bright globular cluster in M3 in Boötes (no need to swap out eyepieces) began to resolve the misty ball
into myriads of individual stars.
Castor split
easily, but I failed to split Rigel which depends on a very clean Airy disk at
high power.
The Harpia
makes a surprisingly good astronomical telescope for Deep Sky and the Moon, a
remarkable achievement for a birding scope even if it is less ideal for planets
and doubles.
Zeiss Harpia 85 vs Tele
Vue TV-85
The TV-85 is a compact astro’ telescope that also gets quite
widely used for terrestrial viewing. How does the Harpia compare? For a start,
the Harpia is a much more complicated device. The TV-85 is just a doublet in a
tube with a rack-and-pinion focuser (more recent versions get dual speed).
The Harpia is much lighter, waterproof and more rugged. It
will mount on an ordinary photo-head that the TV-85 would overload. Surprisingly,
the Harpia also has less false colour from the objective system.
However, The TV-85’s ability to use any eyepiece allows it to
pull ahead in many situations, day or night, potentially revealing more at
higher powers and with a wider less aberrated view. But to realise the TV-85’s
full potential, you would need to invest in several eyepieces and a diagonal.
Unless you’re just determined to have the very sharpest
high-power view, you’d surely choose the Harpia for terrestrial use. For
astronomy, you would undoubtedly pick the TV-85, unless trekking in to some
remote spot to view.
Summary
In most ways the Zeiss Harpia 85
exceeded my expectations and then some. It does something I suspect would have
been impossible even a decade ago: stunningly sharp, bright, flat-to-the-edge
views from a few metres away (yes, even at 65x) to distant galaxies. You could
use it as a long-distance microscope for flowers and insects, or as an
astronomical telescope ... with a spot of birding in between!
Is the Harpia worth its high price,
then? Absolutely!
I was so impressed with the Harpia
it almost feels churlish to criticise it. But it isn’t perfect, so I must. The
clever dual speed focuser mostly works well, but not always for me. The
objective-eyepiece system which delivers many amazing things has a bit too
much lateral false colour and pin-cushion.
The Harpia is obviously is its
element on terrestrial targets, of which it delivers wonderful views. Would I
buy one just for astronomy? Honestly, no, because there are better ways to
spend the money. But the Harpia can certainly do astronomy, giving excellent
lunar and deep sky views. One specific use case might be for astronomy at remote
locations: no astro’ scope of this aperture is as light to trek with, or as
rugged and waterproof.
The Harpia 85 is a remarkable bit of optical engineering. On
a warm summer evening you could focus from a bee three metres away to the Moon
and get a flawless view of both, stopping off at a watchful owl on the way.
Highly recommended.
Buy Zeiss Harpia 85 from Wex here:
