save your money on cross hair illuminated eyepiece!?

[Supernova74]

Hi guys I’ve believed I’ve come up with a little trick without useing an illuminated cross hair eyepiece this is for visual purposes however don,t know how accurate it would be for any imaging and astrophotography etc that would be for someone else to try and test.for starters I always use true north on my Meade 12” ACF and has proven a lot more accurate in initial alignment procedure I found this the difference of actually seeing the alignment star in the field of veiw of the finder scope or being miles out in magnetic north.anyway I’ve never really got on with illuminated cross hair eyepieces found em a little twitchy to use so had a little of a brain wave and it’s this what I’ve come up with!!.?so give it a go and be interested in any feed back and see if it works for you.some people believe it or not do find it hard to just eyeball the alignment star in eyepiece in dead centre and for exsample if you doing aligning with a wide field eyepiece more margin for error all those degrees field of view add up when in goto mode so all you need to do is firstly use your useall eyepiece then on the dust cap drill a hole around 3-5mm dead centre then place the cap back on eyepiece just find the focus as you would do you will see the star in the hole in dust cap this narrows the field of veiw and less margin for error and just centralise the star as per useall as in my scope have noticed some improvements.

 

[JG777]

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Edited May 13, 2020 by JG777
Op missed the humour/smiley

[Supernova74]

First negative response

[miguel87]

If you have a polarscope in your mount it will be more accurate than having polaris centred in your telescope.

You should be aligning the mount not the scope really.

A pinhole eyepiece is useful for collimating tho.

If we are talking about a goto telescope then I have no idea because I never owned one. I thought they did things mostly automatically tho?

Edited May 13, 2020 by miguel87

[Skywatcher130]

In theory I think the hole in the dust cap could suffice however I use an illuminated reticle with my GOTO scope,  particularly at the initial alignment procedure and sometimes during a session if I feel things aren't quite as accurate as they should be.  Every time the scope moves to your chosen target it asks you to centre the target in the eyepiece and confirm and I understand that builds up a more accurate picture over time. I went for a Svbony one off Fleabay, £20 approx, does the job nicely.