Happy New Year — and clear skies in 2026!
Looking back on 2025, I'm incredibly proud of what we've achieved together with the outstanding team at KUO. The coma-correcting eyepieces have made a real impact, and the manufacturing quality KUO delivered for the Houdini 20 and 12 has been widely praised and appreciated by observers.
Looking ahead, we have both some good news and some bad news.
Let's start with the bad news.
There is a slight delay with the first production batch of the Houdini 7. We originally planned to ship around January 10, but production has taken a little longer than expected. We sincerely appreciate your patience and will ship all orders as soon as the eyepieces are available and have successfully passed our QA checks.
Now for the good news!
We have received the prototypes of both the Houdini 9 and the Houdini 30.
The Houdini 9 delivers the ideal intermediate power between the Houdini 12 and 7. First impressions of the prototypes are very promising, but a thorough validation was hampered by poor weather conditions in December. To truly evaluate the 9 mm, we need some good seeing, especially in the 1100 mm F/3.6 telescope where it delivers 440×. We hope to continue testing in the coming weeks before moving forward with the production run.
The Houdini 30 prototypes arrived on the very last day of 2025 — and they are excellent. They deliver an 80° field of view that is sharp to the edge in all Newtonians. The 42 mm field stop is identical to the legendary Nagler 31, but without the need for a coma corrector, the true field ends up being 15% larger!
The most pleasant surprise is the weight - at just 580 grams the Houdini 30 is nearly as light as the Houdini 20.
I quickly tested the Houdini 30 in a brand new, mostly 3D printed, 300 mm (12") F/4 reflector with Orion UK optics. The eyepiece delivers 40X and a true field of view of 2 degrees. Yesterday's full Moon was spectacular, filling a quarter of the field, very sharp and almost absurdly bright. The Pleiades sat comfortably in the field with plenty of space around them and sharp stars from edge to edge. It's a super comfortable eyepiece.
We will continue the validation during the new moon period at our dark site. We also look forward to using a pair on the 6" F/8 binoscope. The slimmer upper housing should make them more comfortable than a pair of Houdini 20s in this setup.
Once again, KUO have done an outstanding job. I fully expect this eyepiece to become the new reference in its class!
The Houdini 9 and 30 are expected to hit the shelves between April and June.
Clear skies!
Robert