Finding one's way about the sky can be a challenge. I am a bit of a purist when it comes to this issue. I believe that to learn the sky properly no finding aids should be used. I often star hop and for a Messier Marathon I use nothing but charts and a Telrad.

But for this scope I decided to install DSCs, I would be using this scope to hunt very dim fuzzies and DSCs allow confident identification of your target. For public star parties the DSCs allow me to find targets quickly when a line of people is waiting and I have tracked an object simply by watching the readout, not having to climb the ladder between viewers to insure the object is still in the eyepiece.

After talking to may other large dob users I decided to get the Sky Commander unit. Good choice! The unit is easy to use and very accurate. On my first night using the unit to track down Herschel 400 objects the sky commander would routinely place an object dead center in a 20 arcmin field allowing me to find and record over 35 objects in a single short summer night. No time was spent hunting for the objects. This says a great deal about the accuracy of the telescope mount. If you have a well build dobsonian with truly orthogonal azimuth and elevation axis a set of DSCs will work well.

I did order the 2048 step encoders from US Digital, with 4 phase quadrature these encoders give 8192 steps of resolution, or 2.6 arcmin. Easily enough to put the target in the field of a high power eyepiece.