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How do you look through your scope? (1 Viewer)

Bosque Bill

Bosque Bill

Active member
I feel dumb asking this question, but I might as well take advantage of your experience.

I just got a nice angled spotting scope and know the technical stuff, but what is the best way to look through the scope for birding.

I mean do you close the eye you are not using, cover the eye, or keep both eyes open, but train yourself to only be aware of the image through the scope?

Or am I missing something really obvious? :h?:

Thanks for your input,
Bill
 
A perfectly relevant question. I find that closing one eye causes pressure in the other. Ideally, a patch over the other eye would be the ideal. However, in the real world, I use a mixture of covering my non-dominant eye with my hand or just closing the eye. The closing the eye thing can cause fatigue over time at the eyepiece. With my DSLR, I keep my non-dominant eye open, as it's looking at the black of the camera so it doesn't impact the vision of the eye doing the work. It would be interesting to hear other viewpoints.
 
I used to a 'squinter' and close one eye. Now, when using a scope, I keep one eye closed until i'm focused on the subject, then I open both. I hardly notice the 'open eye', and, surprisingly enough, our brains are pretty smart and I can even choose which eye I want to see through.
 
It's really a case of what works for the individual. I have to close my other eye, but I know of people who are unable to do this.

Matt_RTH said:
The closing the eye thing can cause fatigue over time at the eyepiece.
Click to expand...

When I was rifle shooting I had a piece of opaque plastic attached to the rifle site - worked perfectly, but I've not found a way to fix anything to the scope as yet.

D
 
I use Flents Eye Patch for observing with either an astronomy scope (night sky) or spotting scope (day nature). The eye patch is one size fits all and concave to allow freedom of the eye being covered. You can order online (see link below) or pick up in many U.S. drug or pharmacy stores. When I am not observing, I hang the patch over the eyepiece or arm of the tripod. For me, the eye patch is the only way to observe when using a scope (day or night).

http://www.google.com/products?hl=en&source=hp&q=flents+eye+patch&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=GWe1SoCtGdCZ8Abf_cWFDg&sa=X&oi=product_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4

...Bob
Kentucky
 
I keep both eyes open - I look through the scope with my dominant eye but am still aware of the view through my other eye. This way I can see movement while viewing through the scope and sometimes spot birds flying by.
 
Four possible solutions (and it´s a perfectly sensible question, came up a few years ago):

1. Train oneself to keep both eyes open. Makes it easier to suddenly "switch" to binos without one eye being half-asleep. Difficult for me on long seawatches, though....the mind wanders during the "lulls" and when the non-scope eye takes over, I start hallucinating and having Vietnam flash-backs. (Which is interesting as I´ve never been to Vietnam).

2. An eye-patch. I have a selection of toy pirate-patches stolen from my son´s toy-box. The best is hard plastic, and "flips" up to accommodate a quick switch to binos. However, it has a little picture of a skull and some pirate-y stuff on it, so other birders may mistake me for Captain Flint or Billy Bones. So I try to smile politely while wearing it. Then they think I´m the half-wit Benn Gunn.

3. If you have a stay-on case, see if you can twist the cover for the eyepiece around to stand in front of your non-scope eye, blocking out the view.

4. Take a length of coat-hanger wire, twist it into a figure of eight with one loop around your eyepiece, the other loop in front of your non-scope eye. Fill in this loop with anything opaque that takes your fancy.


My favourite is the hard plastic eye-patch. It´s kind of convex, so it doesn´t press against the eye when it´s down, and the fact that it lets in a little light means the eye doesn´t go totally comatose, so I can switch to binos quite easily.
Let us know how you get on!
 
Last edited:
Bosque Bill said:
I feel dumb asking this question, but I might as well take advantage of your experience.

I just got a nice angled spotting scope and know the technical stuff, but what is the best way to look through the scope for birding.

I mean do you close the eye you are not using, cover the eye, or keep both eyes open, but train yourself to only be aware of the image through the scope?

Or am I missing something really obvious? :h?:

Thanks for your input,
Bill
Click to expand...

I too have been training my eyes to use both eyes looking though the scope, my dominant eye, my right and switching to my left, and i leave both eyes open when scoping as Sancho said lazy eye when switching to your bins or even worse watery eye !

And a very good question too Bill
 
When I'm looking for long periods - mostly seawatching - I scan with both eyes open and then close my off eye when I get on something. I have an ED82 and the eyepiece cover of my case blocks a lot of light [like Sancho says] and having the eye open a) helps reduce eye strain, and b) gives me a shot at picking up anything passing by close and fast!
 
I have the same scope as Tom, and like him use the eyepiece cover of the stay-on case velcroed to point to the side to block the vision of my non-viewing eye while conveniently not causing it to dark-adapt. I have enhanced the cover's usefulness a bit further by turning it inside-out so that instead of a green surface my idle eye sees a black one. That required installing velcro on the other side of the two tabbies that hold the e-p cover in place, but that was cheap and easy.

Kimmo
 
Great replies, everyone. I've been trying some of your suggestions.

I agree, trying to keep the non-viewing eye closed causes squinting which I think could become quite fatiguing. Completely covering the eye with something opaque like the eye patch causes me a little visual disorientation when I stop using the scope until my eyes adjust.

Figuring out a way to keep both eyes open seems like a good idea. Just as an experiment I first put a black card in front of my non-viewing eye, then a neutral background (the back of my hand an inch or two from my eye.) I was able to visualize the target better with the neutral background which surprised me.

For now I'll use the back of my hand, but will maybe try something like Sancho's #4 suggestion to create my own Visi-Patch as postcardcv suggested. Hmm, wonder if I a pair of cheap, plastic sunglasses could be modified to do the trick.

If I come up with something exceptionally cool, I'll report back.
 
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