Finders Keepers

10/7/2026. I spent some time down in the shop cobbling bracketry from 3/4-inch aluminum channel to hold a finder-scope beside the 400mm lens. The Wave mount should do the finding for me, but it ain't modern times in Sicily. I still need to flash the firmware in the handset and adopt a practical polar-alignment routine. In the meantime, the finder works. Mostly. The finder serves as a polar alignment 'scope when the mount is sent to its home position. I haven't been rigorous with that yet, but a casual try was encouraging. Here's M13 about to disappear behind treetops. After casually aligning the finder and the 400mm, and then being just as casual about using the finder to polar align the mount, a slew by name put M13 somewhere in the finder's field of view. It was not dead center, but it was there, which proves the method and its implementation are not mad. The error will likely shrink with more care in alignments.

M13 with treetops. 23x5s, 400mm F2.8, ISO 6400

I am not convinced that the bracketry is robust enough to survive across multiple nights. We'll see. I'll do a show and tell here when I can say better how it works. For now, it's not hard to reset the alignment with any bright star at which point the finder is good for both hunting targets and for polar alignment. Clouds (and 5+ inches of rain) from hurricane Isaias have forced a pause for at least a few nights.

The finder has a field of view about 5 degrees across which is not much wider than the 400mm's field of view on a full-frame DSLR, but for one reason or another, the relative brightness of stars is not well represented on the R6's viewscreen. The finder will come into its own when I mount chilled cameras with smaller sensors behind this lens.

:: top ::