| This Meade blue 8 x 50mm straight-through finder with quick-release bracket is supplied as standard equipment with many current Meade LX200 telescopes. It is available as a replacement for a finder from these scopes that has been damaged in use or transit, or as an upgrade for the 6 x 30mm finder supplied with older Meade catadioptric telescopes, such as the LX10, 2080, etc.
The blue paint/black trim aluminum-body finder uses a fully-coated achromatic doublet objective lens with a large 50mm aperture that lets you find fainter deep space objects than a 6 x 30mm finder. With a limiting magnitude of 11, it picks up objects over one magnitude dimmer than a 30mm finder, making it easier for you to locate faint nebulas and galaxies. The field of view is 5° wide and the usable eye relief is 10mm. There's a rolldown rubber eyecup for eyeglass use. The finder weighs 19 ounces, including the supplied quick release finder bracket.
The image is upside down and reversed as is normal with a straight-through finder, the same image orientation as the view through a reflector telescope’s eyepiece and on star charts that are turned upside down.
Focusing is done by turning a black knurled ring around the eyepiece. This screws the eyepiece in or out until the crosshairs and image at infinity at the center of the field are sharp for your eyesight.
The supplied quick-release bracket is designed to mount the finderscope on Meade catadioptric telescopes, but it will also mount the finder on almost any reflecting scope. The quick-release base has two 6mm holes on 1.25" centers that line up with the finder bracket mounting holes in the rear cell of Meade telescopes. It attaches semi-permanently to your scope using the bolts supplied with the original telescope finder bracket. The quick release base can also be attached to a reflector’s Sonotube or metal optical tube by using nuts and bolts (not supplied). The curvature of the quick release base will fit virtually any telescope 6" in aperture and larger.
The ring portion of the quick-release bracket has two 62mm i. d. finder mounting rings. The front ring has three hand-tighten plastic collimating screws that center the finder in the bracket. The back ring has two collimating screws and a spring-loaded third screw that make short work of collimating the finder.
The ring portion of the bracket slides into a dovetail slot in the quick-release base and is held in place by two plastic hand-tighten knobs. A stop in the base fits into a groove in the ring portion to lock the ring portion in place and prevent the finder from sliding out of the bracket. The bracket is made of die-cast metal, painted black.
| 
Printer friendly version
Email page link to a friend
Do you have a question about this product?
