First light on Baader Skysurfer Giant red dot finder!

[stargazer1980]

Ok.....i received this as a gift from FLO for winning the iseedarkskies competition and decided on the RDF as a nice new addition to my setup!

First thought was that its very well built and came packaged with lots of different fiiting for almost every telescope! All wrapped up individually in bubble wrap!!

Fitted to my telescope and the thingts a beast! Its got a nice view through it unlike the smaller one that came standard on my 114SLT! Makes aligning it with the stars a lot easier!

So upon setting it up i decided to adjust it to get the red dot in the middle with jupiter as a target! All was easy so i thought...............................................what i found was that on each of the adjusters it tells you the direction in which to turn it to adjust the red dot.........on one of them it says turn R to go RIGHT and L to go LEFT, and on the other one R to go up and L to go down! So i spent about 5 minutes trying to align it and finally realised that you have to turn the knobs the other direction to go opposite to what it says, if that makes any sense at all!

All in all that didnt really bother me as once you have it aligned you dont need to bother with it again!

Its a sturdy piece of kit thats well built and has 11 different brightness setting which are adjusted by a turn of the knob on the top of the RDF!

Easy peasy!

Darren

[proflight2000]

yeah its a great bit of kit darren, had one for a while now and its build is excellent. I do tend to miss my actual finder scope so i basically put the badder on top of the scopes finder and use both at the same time, however the weight might be getting a little on the heavy side.

[Macavity]

Does it work on the reflection of the Red Dot by a semi-silvered mirror? Was just wondering how much light (magnitudes) you loose. Some of the cheap RDFs seem to (variably) loose quite a LOT in... (already sometimes) "mag 4" skies. Positively interested though.

[stargazer1980]

it has 11 different brightness levels but it doesnt reflect off a mirror! You can adjust from very dim to very bright!

HTH

Darren

[Macavity]

HTH, Darren

Yes, helpful indeed. I do have a yen (urge not currency!) to buy one at some time. I wondered just HOW they do it, without a semi-silvered mirror? I do like the idea - Have even thought of trying a fibre optic to "suspend" a small red dot in space...

[FLO]

I wondered just HOW they do it, without a semi-silvered mirror?

Pixie dust

[Whippy]

Chris, I got a RDF with my new scope and so far I'm finding it a joy to use . Haven't learnt the art of star hopping (yet) but they're certainly easy to use.

Tony..