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Looking for comments/experiences using a Red Dot Finder. Any particular ones that you found good (or poor).
We have the several finder scopes, but it seems that we're drifting to the red dot finders, mainly because what you see is what you get — no flipped images. The red dot we do have (Orion EZ Finder II) works well, but sometimes the adjustment appears a little off — when it's locked in place in the dovetail, I run out of adjustment in one direction.
We also have a TelRad. Have not had it out for about a year because we have a disagreement on how to mount the base on our 10in. Dob. (I'm for a permanent mount — screws), AstroMom prefers the foam tape.
Does anyone have any experience with other red dot finder scopes. The Celestron (commonly on ebay for $15-20) looks very similar to the Orion. The knock-offs are a few bucks cheaper, but why bother at that price. TeleVue has one, but for the price, I don't see how it would be any better than the Orion EZ Finder on our 10in.
I've used a Telrad, a cheap Celestron red dot and a couple traditional 50mm finders. For an SCT, I love a Telrad. Most of my work now is with refractors and I'm fairly happy with either a red dot or a 50mm finder. Once the finder gets me in the ballpark, I like using a low power eyepiece, like a 32mm to center things up before moving on to higher powers.
But now I'll tell you a bit about how I cheat these days. I'm an imager and as such I'm more interested in getting on target as fast as I can. But my field-of-view is pretty small, like 66×48 minutes, and I used to spend an inordinate amount of time getting an object centered. First I use a goto (Hey, I can see you visual guys rolling your eyes). Second, I use Astrotortilla to snap an image, plate-solve it and then re-slew the mount if the coordinates are not correct. It's a thing of beauty to sit back and let the software do it's thing (image, re-slew, repeat) till the target is centered. Finders?
Star hopping? Hah! 😉
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