Schro

The baffle sheet is 3D printed in black PLA each of the vanes are angled on the back side so with the end that you are looking at being oriented at the top from the build plate I was able to print without supports (Ender3, budget PLA, 0.2mm layer height, about 5 1/2hours print time) i primed it with a rattle can of paint for plastic to help with adhesion and airbrush sprayed Musou black

This is obviously a discussion about compromises.😁 I have done quite a bit of work on the optical tube in an attempt to improve contrast. i live in a light polluted area so my thought was to do my best to minimize any reflections and stray light (hence the baffles. I think they turned out well the internal reflections are so significantly reduced now that it is difficult to see all 9 baffles down the tube (musou black paint on the baffles and flocking on the tube wall helped with that) the stock focuser was a floppy piece of crap that made it difficult to collimate, so I’ve replaced with an Antares low profile helical focuser if I hadn’t already done so much work I would have found a way to lengthen the tube to make the stock secondary work more effectively. The low profile focuser gives me some leeway so that ‘was’ a viable option . But I’m not prepared to re-do all of the baffles at this point. Given the small aperture my intuition says minimizing the central obstruction would be best for my use case, so a 35mm mirror if I can find one without a “dodgy” edge, after all, the math says it should work but I recognize that theory doesn’t always coincide with experience, and my intuition could be wrong, and since this is my first telescope I have nothing to compare it against I will check out https://www.bbastrodesigns.com/NewtDesigner.html#diagonal thanks for the reference.

I recently undertook the task of baffling my 114 F4 reflector (Celestron Cometron 114) for the purpose of this I did a scale ray-trace diagram to plan baffle size and location and 3D printed the baffles. from my ray trace drawing I was able to measure the width of the light cone where it hits the secondary mirror at 34mm wide (I verified this with a bit of trigonometry) the OEM secondary mirror is 34mm but because of defects from the beveled edge the flat useable surface is actually 31.5 to 32mm. This means that it is only utilizing about 86-90% of the aperture of the primary. I would like to replace with a better mirror. Available sizes are constrained. Should I go with a 35mm or 40mm? On a fast Newtonian like this will a limited secondary size make collimating more difficult? Primarily visual use but I may experiment with EAA. PS don’t mind the paw prints on the drawing. My daughter’s kitten found my berry smoothie.