Procyon Lotor

I'm in a city with Bortle 7 skies, so really just moon and planets and a couple of the brightest of DSOs available from my SW-facing balcony view. On clear nights, for more serious observing, I drive out to a Bortle 4 location that shows the Milky Way decently and M33 on the best nights is a difficult averted vision target.

It's a Bausch and Lomb 114mm Newtonian, 900mm focal length from the mid90s. Made in Japan. OTA is a steel tube, pretty sturdy and blackened on the inside. No correcting lens in the focus tube, just a shitty 0.965 inch barrel rack and pinion focuser. I managed to get some decent Antares plossls to improve the views compared to the awful eyepieces it came with. Giving a look down the barrel of the focuser just now with no eyepiece in place, the focuser barrel is also blackened, but the reflection of my eye in the secondary doesn't seem to be fully aligned so I am suspecting that is the biggest problem - collimating the secondary.

The back end of the scope is sealed up tight in this model, so unfortunately that is not the source. I am wondering if my secondary isn't quite aligned right and I'm getting internal reflections from the tube of the focuser.

Hi, I'm from Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. I've been fascinated with the night sky since I was a kid. I started out with a small 2.5 inch department store refractor and in my teens bought a 114mm equatorial reflector that has been my instrument for the last 20 years of off and on dedication to the hobby. I got a bit too busy during university and graduate school, and I didn't have much space where I was renting so my telescope sadly stayed in my parents' basement for a good chunk of those years. In the process of saving up for a larger scope, probably a 12 inch collapsible or truss Dobsonian. I love hunting down DSOs, challenging my observing skills even with my limited equipment.

Hi all, New to the forum. I noticed when I was out the other night that my field of view was not uniformly dark all the way across, but seemed brighter to the lower left and darker to the upper right. This configuration stayed regardless of which of my three eyepieces I was using and what direction/object I was pointed at with my telescope. It's an F/8 114mm Newtonian on an equatorial mount. Since I'm most interested in DSO hunting, this is a big problem. Any ideas what's wrong with my scope?