Torutro

Thanks for the guide, it really helped!

Somehow though, once I look down the focused tube, the edge of the secondary mirror holder is visible on the primary mirror (Circled in the photo). I figured it may be due to the tilt of the holder, but I’m still unsure as to how I can adjust it without putting everything out of alignment again. 

Is this normal to be happening? If not, how should I go about fixing it?

So, I managed to physically adjust the secondary mirror holder with my hand until the primary mirror’s reflection filled up the field of view.

However, the secondary mirror’s reflection at the center of the spider vanes is still off, and when I try to fix it by regular collocation, the entire secondary mirror rotates and once again moves out of alignment.

Does anybody know why this is happening? Is it normal for a secondary mirror to become loose?

Thanks for the advice! I’ll give it a go and try to fix the issue.

Hi all!

I’m not exactly sure as to where I should post this, but since I’m a beginner with basic questions, I assume this is the correct forum.

So I’ve gotten the hang of my Celestron 130EQ over the last two months and collimated it with ease. As usual, I did a star check to see if the secondary mirror was aligned (it was not) and I brought it inside and angled it towards a lit wall for better light. When I looked down the eyepiece tube, I saw that only half the of the primary mirror could be seen and the other half was the wall of the telescope tube (photos attached).

I assumed with my basic knowledge that the secondary mirror was angled the wrong way, so I tried to adjust it until the screws began to come loose, and stopped to prevent any further damage via my lack of proper skill.

Any ideas on what exactly happened, and how I could fix it? 
 

Sincerest regards,

Torutro

P.S: I know the primary mirror isn’t collimated, but I couldn’t get the full field of view to do it properly.

Thank you all so much! I'm truly indebted to this community for their help. 

Thanks for the advice!
 

I'll give it a go tonight, but just a quick question, will the dec circle also be accurate then, and is it just an issue with the ra circle?

Hi!

Some of you might remember me as the noob from the q's on focusing, and unfortunately I have another beginner question, this time on setting circles.

So I recently bought my first telescope, a Celestron 130 EQ, and after doing a fair bit of observing visible stars and planets, I tried to hunt for some DSO's using the celestial co-ordinates from the app on my phone. However, when I aligned the setting circles to the correct points, nothing could be seen. Ultimately, I did find the object using my naked eye, and it was way off from the co-ordinates given.

After repeating this with a few other objects, the issue remained. I have my latitude put in on the altitude dial, mount is aligned with Polaris, but the issue remains. I heard that sometimes the setting circles pointer can be wrong and needs to be adjusted, and if so, how should I do it? Is there any other reason for this to be happening? 

Thank you so much for all the help!

I'll do some hunting on extensions and lenses and hopefully resolve the issue of the spider vanes and the magnification. 

Once again, thanks!

Torutro

53 minutes ago, markse68 said:

I suspect that what you’re seeing is the diffraction spikes from the spider vanes- they’re kinda inevitable with a newt on bright subjects. Sirius last night was producing razor sharp laser beams that spanned the whole fov in mine. The other issue is magnification. Mars is pretty small even at quite high magnification. Your scope is 650mm focal length I think so your 10mm ep will give you 65x magnification. I was observing Mars last night and the best view before i lost contrast was 200x and even then the disk is quite small in the eyepiece. but big enough to see some detail. You might try a 2x barlow to get a bigger disk but your scope is never going to produce a big image of Mars. Sounds like your focusing is fine if you get good views of the moon 👍 

Thanks!

What you're saying makes a lot of sense now that I understand more about what's happening. On Celestron's official site, it says the highest useful magnification for this telescope is 307x, if I wanted to reach this, how is it achieved? Hopefully it'll help with the image.

Once again, please forgive my lack of proper terminology and understanding. I need to get a hold of a glossary specifically for astronomy. 😄

1 hour ago, Stu said:

Toruto, the bottom image in the link is the one that IS in focus, the others are other of focus. Objects are at their smallest when in focus; stars are point like, and planets show a small disk. Planets are small, so need a lot of magnification to see properly, somewhere above x100 to x150 would be a starting point; Jupiter can often look best at x180 but it depends on the conditions. Mars generally needs more, over x200 if the skies can take it.

I would try focusing on the Moon with the 10mm then panning the scope across to Mars as it should be essentially the same focus point, perhaps just a minor tweak needed.

Thank you so much for the advice!

I’ll give it another go, but the issue is that even with the 10mm eyepiece Mars appears in black and white hidden behind the spider vanes.

I might invest is some more powerful eyepieces, but according to the instruction manual, I should be able to see Mars and Jupiter without needing an additional eyepiece, so I was a fair bit confused as to why they were appearing just as points.

I was using the 20mm erect image eyepiece as well as the 10mm that came with the telescope. I'd focused to the max and minimum, but the spider vanes still appeared. 

Hi,

I've been an amateur stargazer for a long time, and I recently bought my first (proper) telescope - the Celestron AstroMaster 130EQ - to develop it further.

However, when I look through the eyepiece, the spider vanes and secondary mirror shadow square appear above the image. After numerous days of trawling over other message boards and forums, I understood that this must be a focusing issue. Even after adjusting the focus by large margins, the spider vanes still appear over the image and warp it. 

I managed to find a forum board, that shared the exact issues, but did not provide a means of resolving it. The guy talks about his issues with Venus, but mine are with Jupiter and Mars. Here's the link:

https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/19826/mirror-telescope-blocked-sight

The only time the image does not show the spider vanes is when it loses focus and is reduced to a single point, like in the bottom image of the link.

Any ideas on how to resolve this? Forgive my novice-level use of vocabulary, I've only had the telescope for a week.

Edit: For some reason, the issue doesn't appear for the moon, which is crystal clear and fully visible. Anybody have a reasoning for this?