Howie Glatter may be the king of laser collimators, but he advocates
using a laser pointer as a finder. That's just asking for an aircraft
to encounter your beam.

There is nothing wrong with using the pointer as a finder - just don't point
it at low-flying airplanes. I guess it depends on where you observe
vis-a-vis flight path, etc. We don't have our pointer mounted on a scope,
but we do use it as a finder. One of us will locate a target in our mounted
binos, and illuminate it with the handheld laser so that we can find it in
our scopes. The binos (9x63, 20x80, and even 7x50) are much better than any
finder we could mount on the scopes.

Dennis