Joe B wrote:
I found the sun by watching the OTA's shadow, and when it was as small as possible in all direcitons, it was pointing at the sun. -- Joe
Thanks. I've use that too for solar observing. For the specific application I'm working on - daytime acquisition of Venus - I'm trying to come up with a light-touch solution for centering the Sun that does not involve putting the solar filter on the main scope. Rather, I want to leave the light-touch opaque scope lid in place. The plan is to: 1) align the finder and scope on a terresterial object, 2) put the light-touch solar filter on the finder and the standard opaque lid on the scope, 3) center on the sun, 4) set the manual setting circles to 0, 5) offset index slew to Venus using ephemeris data, and, 6) take the light-touch solar filter off the finder. Hopefully, Venus will be somewhere in the 3 1/2 deg finder view. Then I can take the opaque lid off the mainscope. I can do the same thing using the larger full scope solar filter off. But wrestling the tight-fitting main scope solar filter tends to jostle the scope and mount around. - Kurt _______________________________________________ Sent via CSolutions - http://www.csolutions.net