What's the advantage of an illuminated reticle eyepiece?

I just want to hear it from the 'experts' on these boards, as they have used them!



Seanie.

Seanie --

Not sure whether you're asking "what's the advantage of a reticle" or "what's the advantage of the illumination".

The reticle gives you much better alignment and drive training on something like an LX200 (or other GoTo scope). It's also much easier to drift align with a reticle (otherwise you have to use the fieldstop, which is annoying if the star drifts the wrong way).

When the moon's out or you're at a light-polluted site, the illumination isn't that important. But when you get out to even a reasonably dark site (say Bortle 4 or better) the cross-hairs start to get awful hard to see without illumination. You can always shine an LED flashlight into the objective to "brighten" the background, but this can get old after a while (particularly if you can't reach the front of your scope from the viewing end).

-- Jeff.

I use mine for centering guide stars so I can find them on a CCD chip. ALso for drift aligning (which I dont do too often) as Jeyjey says without the illuminator it would be inpossible to see the crosshairs even in a resonably light polluted sky.

I've just discovered that the st-4 flip mirror which has a built in centering reticle can accept the illuminator from the meade astrometric eyepiece.
I can now see the crosshairs properly against the dark background.

I use it for collimating and centering when doing my 2 star allign.
I use it with the st-4 for getting the star on the ccd chip.

I just use the finder scope to put objects onto the CCD. I find it works nearly every time. If it doesn't, I just move the scope in a spiral outward pattern, taking an image each time, until the object is in the FOV...

If you have a CCD, you'd should rarely, if ever, need an illuminated reticle. I even use the CCD for collimation - does a much better job than my eyes.

And there's even new software out there that will use your CCD for characterising the optical capability (or inabilty) of your system.

Am I missing something here?

If you have a CCD, you'd should rarely, if ever, need an illuminated reticle. I even use the CCD for collimation - does a much better job than my eyes.

I agree with you for every ccd out there except the st-4, its ccd is even smaller then the toucam and is not really an imaging ccd, so you cant see its field of view as you run it without a pc, (you can make educated guesses using the readout display, but I'm not getting into that here).