Solar Finder-Scope by julianh72

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

Solar Finder for your telescope - clips onto your existing finder-scope, and projects a dot onto the target to tell you when your telescope is solar-aligned.
WARNING: ONLY USE THIS IF YOUR TELESCOPE HAS A FULL-APERTURE SOLAR FILTER OR YOU COULD BLIND YOURSELF!!!!
Note: The part has been completely re-designed to be able to be 3D-printed without support - print it standing up. (This version supersedes my previous "Solar Finder-Scope", which was not well set-out for 3D printing.)
Fit a full aperture solar filter to your telescope, then point your telescope towards the sun - the pinhole casts a bright spot onto the target, to help you align your telescope to the sun.
Depending on the precision / tolerance of your printer, and the accuracy of alignment when it snaps onto your existing finder, the solar dot may or may not hit the centre of the target cross-hairs when solar-aligned, but it should be fairly reproducible between solar viewing sessions (especially if you leave it fixed to the finder-scope rather than removing and re-installing it).
You may need to modify the diameter of the clip to suit your finderscope so that it can just click on. (This is detailed to suit my Celestron Red Dot Finder - OD = 26 mm). Thingiverse files are un-editable "lumps" - a full parametric editable version is hosted as a Public Share on my OnShape Account https://www.onshape.com/ - just search for "Solar Finder Mk 3".
You may need to ream out the pinhole with a drill bit to get a nice clean sun image on the target.