PROJECT : Travelscope as guide

[GazA]

hi guys,

bored this sunday morning and getting my engineering head on, i have a Skywatcher 130p on a eq2 mount and a celestron travelscope 70, being a week before payday and not totally satisfied with the red dot finder on the scope got me thinking ...... with these factors.

:red dot finder is no good at finding slightly darker objects

:mount & tripod on the travelscope is absolutely useless, but the scope is reasonable

Objective : mounting the travelscope onto tube rings of the 130 to use as finder for darker objects

has anyone thought of doing this or done this with any success?

[Ad Astra]

you will very often see smaller scopes mounted on larger ones either as finders or as guide scopes. Most people use some sort of a bar across the top of the scope rings and mount the smaller scope to that.

Dan

[ollypenrice]

Yep, I used to use an ST80 as a finder on the big Dob. Pretty good, but you do have to do some improvising to get it aligned. You also need the widest possible EP really. In 1.25 that would be a TV 32 Plossl ideally. But any reasonably wide one will do.

Olly

[GazA]

ive managed to get mount it via i believe it might be some kind of camera mount bolt on top of the tube ring, and just used a cable tie to get a close enough angle just to see if it can be done, yet only managed to look at a aerial on top of a nearby roof top, so will have to see how good my guess work is when i take it and try it on a star.

kept confusing me as the travel scope has an erecting prism on it meanwhile the scope doesnt! lol

[Seliotis]

I would not recommend piggybacking a travelscope. Rings are much better choice since it minimizes flexure. Otherwise you will find that as the guide scope shifts in it's mount it will no longer point in the same direction as the main scope.

[MjrTom]

Hello,

Personally I have ditched the 9x50 right angled finder on my 80mm refractor in favour of using a red dot finder and a 2 inch EP in my scope (14x mag). I see far more this way than using a 50mm finder scope.

Once located using the wideangle EP I switch to a higher power one to view the object.