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Old 15-04-2014, 12:59 PM
Renato1 (Renato)
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Renato1 is offline
 
Join Date: Mar 2014
Location: Frankston South
Posts: 1,279
I really wouldn't think you'd need to do anything to your binoculars for tonight.

That said, making an aperture mask is simple. get the cheapest black plastic folder that you store loose A4 paper in. Mark it with a compass, and cut out two discs that cover the front aperture. Mark the smaller aperture that you want and cut that out, so that you have a disc with a big hole cut out of it.

I then just cut out a long strip of plastic, wrap it around the front tube and tape it together, then put the disc next to the wrap, and tape the disc to it with lots of black insulation tape. You then have an aperture mask that you can easily slip on and off.

Alternatively, just for tonight, you can just tape the aperture mask to the front of your binoculars.

As for filters. If you have a lot of eye relief, just get the filters that you'd use on a telescope eyepiece, put a small amount of Blutack or other reuseable adhesive around the metal edge, and stick it over the front eyepiece.

This Blutack trick - if you have the long eye-relief - also works extremely well with nebula filters on binoculars. Curiously, it actually works best if you only use one nebula filter over one eyepiece, and superimpose the filtered and unfiltered images. When I've used two nebula filters in binoculars I thought the view was too dark, and I didn't actually see any more nebulas than by using one alone.

Back to the moon, if you don't have a neutral density or polarising filters, the other thing you can do is go look for cheap $5 sunglasses that seem to give the clearest image, then cut bits off them with heavy duty scissors, and stick those bits over the binocular eyepieces with Blutack.

They used to sell Ambervison and BluBlocker sunglasses in $2 shops, which were great for cutting up and attaching to eyepieces. They were actually better than the telescope eyepiece filters I'd bought for my telescopes to view Jupiter - but you do get the yellow colour over everything.
Good luck,
Renato
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