ORION SKYSCANNER 100 REFLECTOR HOW TO

Which I had done by mistake when remounting the scope in the rings. You can just mount the optical tube backwards. The good news is there was no need for the soft wobbly foam tape. The bad news was I'm a moron and bad at spatial reasoning. It was kind of bouncy and it didn't feel sturdy, but I supposed it'd have to do. When the tape arrived, I tried to fix the finder to the telescope tube. I had to figure out a way to put the red dot finder on the other side of the focuser, so the focuser could be rotated away from the altitude arm without the red dot finder going on the bottom. And since the tube rings added perhaps a half-inch extra distance, the eyepiece was farther inwards, meaning it was very difficult to reach the eyepiece without being forced to brush up against the mount, causing wobble and vibrations at the eyepiece and just general discomfort. But though the finderscope could be rotated to the top of the tube, the eyepiece had to be on the same side of the mount as the altitude fork-arm. The dovetail wasn't tightened well enough and it wobbled a lot as I tried to move the scope. I tried it the next night and was a little disappointed. Using the washers from the tube rings, with new nuts and a 1 inch long screw, I was able to sort of hack together a solution, using the original SkyScanner dovetail with the new rings.įinally it was put together. I went to a hardware store and found the right screws, and found longer ones. Small screws and a small nut hold the dovetail into the metal OTA. The trouble is that the SkyScanner's permanently-mounted dovetail uses a nonstandard screw compared to what tube rings are expecting. When they finally arrived, I started my surgery. When the tube rings shipped, she left the telescope at my house again. In the meantime, we discovered that with the SkyScanner with its base mounted on one of my tripods, the eyepiece position was a little worse but the finder position was partially solved. However, when I ordered the tube rings something like the 22nd of December for an expected delivery date of mid-January, they didn't arrive until the 16th of February. I've been very lucky with pandemic telescope availability, and most of the equipment I've ordered has arrived ahead of schedule. I didn't order a dovetail bar, to save money, since the telescope already has one. The 116mm tube rings I ordered, based on measurements of the tube's outer diameter, turned out to be slightly too large.

Instead, I decided to order some tube rings from Orion.

With Quinn's permission, I was going to keep the SkyScanner for a few days and drill out the new holes to remount the dovetail, but I chickened out since I have no experience with drilling holes in metal and it wasn't my telescope to ruin. He doesn't like red dot finders (I like them fine, when used properly) and removed his, but the replacement laser wasn't an option in this case. In an article by Matt Wedel on his blog, 10 Minute Astronomy, he details 6 hacks to the Orion SkyScanner including remounting the dovetail bracket to a different angle, thereby putting the eyepiece at a more comfortable angle. Quinn has worse mobility than I, and simply can't get her head behind the finder in most cases. I can barely do it, and don't have great mobility myself. The red dot finder meanwhile is on the side, meaning you have to bend down very low to get your eye behind it. The SkyScanner's eyepiece is on the top of the OTA (when pointed near the horizon), and thus you have to lean down over it to look through. This use case requires being very comfortable to use and having an adequate unit-power finder, since a right angle finderscope would be overkill. As the name implies it's to be used for scanning the skies for deep sky objects, a bit like a pair of binoculars, except with a sturdy mount instead of a finicky tripod or wobbly hands. The Orion SkyScanner 100 is a 4' f/4 Newtonian reflector with a non-diffraction-limited parabolic mirror, on a tabletop Dobsonian mount which is simple, sturdy, and easy to use. So I had to work to fix the eyepiece and finderscope problem.

ORION SKYSCANNER 100 REFLECTOR HOW TO

While teaching Quinn, how to use the telescope, we found that due to some motor disabilities she deals with, the telescope was ergonomically almost unusable. The eyepiece ends up too high and the straight-thru finder too low. As noted in my review and pretty much any time I talk about it, the position of the red dot finder and the eyepiece is. For Christmas, I bought my cousin Quinn (19) an Orion SkyScanner 100, one of the telescopes I recommend most for beginners on a budget, especially but not limited to kids.

Orion skyscanner 100 reflector