Had to choose between a telescope with a finderscope and one with a red dot sight for Jupiter viewing

Picked the red dot sight, spent 20 minutes trying to center Jupiter on my phone camera through the eyepiece, and ended up with a blurry smudge that looked more like a weird star, has anyone else had better luck with the finderscope route?

2 comments

2 Comments

park.robin1mo ago

Ditch the phone camera thing, you will never get good results that way. Get a finderscope, it makes centering stuff so much easier because you're looking through an actual scope instead of a screen. The red dot sights are fine for quick alignment but once you're trying to get a planet centered for high magnification, you need the finderscope. Just skip the phone adapter altogether and use a dedicated planetary camera or manual tracking. I learned this the hard way with Saturn, spent two hours messing with my phone and got nothing. Now I just use a finderscope and a basic eyepiece projection setup, takes about 30 seconds to center Jupiter.

faithwalker1mo ago

Nah, red dot is way faster once you get the hang of it, finderscopes just add more stuff to fiddle with.