Quote:
Originally Posted by AstralTraveller
I'll defend straight-through finders. I grew up using one, fortunately on a very tall scope. By keeping both eyes open I can use them as a zero-power finder and then close one eye when the target is in the fov. RA finders are useless for this, so unless I use the laser as a zero-power finder I can't find a thing with an RA finder.
My wife once borrowed one of those 'point it at the sky and it will tell you what you are looking at' devices. Worse than useless. Firstly, the display overwhelms the sky so you can't even see the star/area you are trying to identify. Despite that the display is too faint to be easily read. Then the pointing accuracy is lucky to be 5* so you could aim it at M7 and be told you are looking at M6, or M8 or some mag 14 galaxy.
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I will acknowledge that you do indeed make a very valid point on the duality of their usefulness. Unfortunately for me though I could just never get my head around (literally) using one. You are quite right about the limitation of an RA finderscope as I discovered the first time out under truly dark skies... I now have a red dot finder fitted as well...
On the other point, I use my phone with skysafari plus which enables you to point at the sky to identify things... It's not too bad but, doubt it has the real discrimination necessary for objects that are close together. I find I tend to use it to identify bright stars during alignments (or even the not so bright for calibration stars on the Celestron mount) & as a handy reference for looking up catalogue numbers & gauging what I should be looking for