Tom Nathe's C5+ Setup 

Technique for Polar Alignment of a C5+

Tom Nathe
Beaverton, Oregon
August 2002
Usual scope setup. With compass, finderscopes and painted locations for the holes.
The "Warning" sticker I found on ebay. It does get peoples attention however.
Close-up of compass with magnetic declination offset. Using a compass with straight sides really helps, just slide it up against the riser on the base and with the proper settings, polar alignment is a snap. In my case, magnetic north is about 23 degrees east of polar north.
Declination maps can be found on the web or on topographic maps.
Tripod head with wedge painting (glued on glitter with whiteout). The painted end goes north.
Showing the up pointing mounting screws.
Detail of finderscope bracket. Still a work in progress, not really happy with this arrangement: the finderscope and the zero power finder get in  each others way. 

The plastic block was found at work already cut out to the outer diameter of that part of the scope. I just cut out the mounting holes and added a post to mount the finders to. The nice part of this arrangement is that it easily comes off when I'm doing solar viewing for the public.
Images and text are the Copyright of Tom Nathe and used by permission.  Remaining contents Copyright © 2002 by Pietro Carboni.