Solar Obseerving Advice
Q: I have a Celestron 8SE with the required filter for solar observing. I am having trouble, however, getting the sun in the field of view. I removed the finder (red dot) because I don't want the sun to burn through it, nor do I of course want to look thru the finder at the sun. I've found the solar tracking menu in the telescope's hand controller, so I'm good there. Here's the problem: With no finder, and the extreme darkening from the filter (a good thing, I have no wish to go blind!) I'm finding it impossible to to get the sun within my fov for observing it. Any advice that will make this easier? I know about using the shadow of telescope, but I am not finding that to be of any help.
A: I'd suggest getting a small sheet of Baader film and making a filter to pop over the finder scope. It's what I have for my 4.5 inch Newt and it was very useful for the last Transit of Venus Your red dot finder is not at risk from the Sun, so there's no need to remove it. I can usually use the shadow of the scope, but if you're having problems with that, you can make a solar finder. Tape a piece of cardboard at the front of your scope, poking radially outward. Punch a small hole in it. That will project an image of the Sun towards the rear of the scope. Put another piece of paper at the back, get the scope aligned on the Sun (by whatever means... you need to do it once), and then mark the position of the Sun's image on the rear screen. In the future you can easily use this to find the Sun again. If you have an ordinary finder on your scope, you can use it a couple of ways. A tiny pinhole in its lens cap will let you find the Sun through the eyepiece, or you can use a piece of Baader film or other full aperture solar filter material on it. One other trick I've found useful is to align on the Sun with the eyepiece removed. That gives you a much wider field, and you can look to get the Sun centered (this is pretty easy with an SCT, using its secondary as a reference). That will usually get things close enough that the Sun will at least be in the field of a low power EP.
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