glass element. The elements are thick, strongly curved, and their surfaces have a common center giving it the name "monocentric". It was invented by Hugo Adolf Steinheil around 1883. This design, like the solid eyepiece designs of Robert Tolles, Charles S. Hastings, and E. Wilfred Taylor, is free from ghost reflections and gives a bright contrasty image, a desirable feature when it was invented (before anti-reflective coatings). It has a narrow field of view of around 25° and is a favorite amongst planetary observers. Erfle An erfle is a 5-element eyepiece consisting of two achromatic lenses with extra lenses in between. They were invented during the first world war for military purposes, described in US patent by Heinrich Erfle number 1,478,704 of August 1921 and are a logical extension to wider fields of four element eyepieces such as Plössls. Erfle eyepieces are designed to have wide field of view (about 60 degrees), but they are unusable at high powers because they suffer from astigmatism and ghost images. However, with lens coatings at low powers (focal lengths of 20 mm and up) they are acceptable, and at 40 mm they can be excellent. Erfles are very popular because they have large eye lenses, good eye relief and can be very comfortable to use. König The König eyepiece has a concave-convex positive doublet and a plano-convex singlet. The strongly convex surfaces of the doublet and singlet face and (nearly) touch each other. The doublet has its concave surface facing the light source and the singlet has its almost flat (slightly convex) surface facing the eye. It was designed in 1915 by German optician Albert König (1871−1946) as a simplified Abbe. The design allows for high magnification with remarkably high eye relief — the highest eye relief proportional to focal length of any design before the Nagler, in 1979. The field of view of about 55° makes its performance similar to the Plössl, with the advantage of requiring one less lens. Modern versions of Königs can use improved glass, or add more lenses, grouped into various combinations of doublets and singlets. The most typical adaptation is to add a positive, concave-convex simple lens before the doublet, with the concave face towards the light source and the convex surface facing the doublet. Modern improvements typically have fields of view of 60°−70°. RKE An RKE eyepiece has an achromatic field lens and double convex eye