sarahpatel•2mo agoMost Upvoted

Stared at Jupiter for 3 years before I realized my finder scope was off

I kept wondering why I could never center planets in my eyepiece. Frustrating. Then during a clear night in January I pointed my scope at the Pleiades. The finder showed a completely different spot in the sky. That's when it clicked. I had been fighting a misaligned finder scope for over three years. Has anyone else wasted that much time on such a simple fix?

3 comments

3 Comments

foster.patricia2mo ago

Oh man, that's brutal but I bet a ton of people have done something similar. Three years is rough though. First thing I'd say is always check your finder alignment with a known bright star or the moon before each session. Takes like two minutes. I use a distant streetlight during the day if I'm setting up early. Also practical tip: loosen the finder screws just a bit, center a bright star in your main eyepiece at low power, then adjust the finder so the crosshairs match. Do it every single time you get a new scope or move it around a lot. I had a buddy who fought bad tracking for months before he realized his finder was off by a full degree.

theaward2mo ago

Wait, don't you align the finder to the main scope first, not the other way around?

noah8801mo ago

...and see, that's exactly the trap I think a lot of folks fall into, including me when I started out. But here's something nobody's brought up yet - if you're using a red dot finder instead of a magnifying one, you gotta account for parallax, especially at close distances. That streetlight trick @foster.patricia mentioned works great, but only if you're far enough away. I've seen guys waste an hour because they were aligning on a tree branch 50 feet out and the red dot was way off at infinity. Also, pro tip nobody tells you: check your finder bracket screws aren't stripped before you even start, because a loose base is a nightmare you can't fix by just tweaking the adjustment knobs.