To my fellow n00Bs - They're not kidding about collimation!

[russ.will]

It's still all too exciting at the moment and I want to do everything at once. However, even in the brief periods of clear calm available over the last week or so since I unboxed my 'scope, I've tried to restrict myself to trying to learn something every night, before I give in and reward myself with a two star alignment and have a look at some stuff using the GOTO.

But all is not well dear reader.

My SW 200P shows reasonably clean and sharp images with the supplied 25mm eyepiece - Saturn was bright, clear, albeit very small, but there was no doubt what it was.

The 10mm eyepiece was almost totally unable to resolve it as anything other than a larger, but fuzzy blob with only the slightest hint of a ring 'bulge'. Turning the scope on Arcturus (Hell! I'm a beginner and it's dead easy to find) the 10mm EP simply went from being double fuzzy to passing through all manner of bizarre dumbell shapes, with the sharpest image being a sort of crossbow. Then there's all the stuff that should be there, but isn't. I checked alignment by slewing to something bright like Vega, Arcturus (again!) or Polaris and each time it appeared in the middle 1/3 of the FOV, so where had all the other stuff gone? I know it's the thin end of the year, but apart from a very brief, averted vision gaze of the Ring Nebula I was seeing sod all, even though I stayed up until 1:30am, on a school night at that!

Damn odd I thought; Clearly this particular n00b was missing something.

The next day, in daylight, I focused the scope on a distant roof and whilst the ridge tiles looked sharp through the 25mm EP, through the 10mm it looked murky and indistinct like the mother of all finger prints had touched it's optics. Now, whilst I'm sure the supplied SW EPs aren't exactly cutting edge, this was image quality like you'd see through a pair of kiddies binoculars and I couldn't believe they could be that bad.

With basically nothing to loose and knowing that I'd need one on a regular basis anyway, I bought an Astro Engineering Colli-Mate Delux (couldn't resist spending the extra fiver for the anodized alloy instead of plastic) and then confused myself stupid whilst reading/watching any number of on-line tutorials prior to using it. What was made clear, is that the view down the focusing tube I could see without either an eyepiece or the Colli-Mate was way, way off the mark. It looked like an ever reducing series of 2/3 moon shapes - Not even so much as one full circle visible. I was even struggling to see the secondary mirror holder. One hour later and with reference to a few tutorials, I managed to improve matters to a point matching what the resources show you as a badly aligned 'scope. It's no fun as a beginner when even the worst case scenario pictured is better than your own starting point.

That said, it was about fifteen minutes after that that the view through the Colli-Mate was tweaked to looking pretty much bang on, so it wasn't wasted time - It let me find out how much some screws need turning to make a small difference, whilst the opposite is true for others. With nothing to loose, you may as well 'rack it from lock to lock' and see what gives as you can't stuff up something that's already, well, you get the picture.

Finally, I pointed the scope back down from the rapidly dimming sky at the ridge tiles mentioned earlier and to say the difference wasn't small is to drastically understate the improvement. The view through the 10mm EP was brighter and sharper at 10pm, than it had been through the 25mm, two hours earlier. Much, much sharper with the resolution obscuring grey fuzz totally absent. Unfortunately, I'm not going to get a chance to get outside tonight, but I've looked through enough binos and spotting scopes in my time to recognize a quantum leap when I see it.

My points, for any other beginners who've stuck through this yarn this far, are these:

1. This is a brand new scope, removed from it's box for the first time a week ago and used on three brief occasions and treated with loving hands. 'New' simply means you have a lovely shiny new play thing, but it does not mean that you have something in any way close to being close to optimally usable out of the box. It does not matter that you drove home like you were bringing your first born back from the maternity ward. The bloke who drove it across China to the docks, the bloke who loaded it, the weather on the high seas, the bloke who unloaded it, the haulier that drove it from the docks to the importer and worst of all, the courier who delivered it to your dealer or maybe your door, didn't give a stuff which means...

2..If you buy a reflector, then there is no reason not to stick another £30 in 'Your Cart' and get the collimator you WILL need at the same time. You will likely need it before your first clear night, which lets face it is a minimum of one week after you got the scope home. This is nature's way of telling you to use those bright, blank clouds.

3. New and better EPs are a seductive next purchase. Until you're confident you can collimate accurately, you probably haven't seen your current crop at their best. I in no way think I am about to achieve that after my first crack at the task.

4. Collimating isn't as difficult as it initially appears as long as you do it in the steps the tutorials suggest - don't jump back and forth. I did note that some tutorials do assume that the secondary mirror support vanes have all been adjusted to correctly centre the secondary mirror. On my SW 200P, this turned out to be far from the case and had me scratching my head for about 10 minutes until I realized that step one of the tutorial I was following was missing a step zero.

5. Now I've done all of this, its going to be cloudy for another week, isn't it?

Russell

[RikM]

Yep, you've probably blanketed the sky for a few days at least, but it's great to hear that you found collimation to be not so arduous a task after all and it really does make a tremendous difference to the detail you can see. It is an essential skill that takes an hour or so to learn but gives years of good views in return.

Well done on a good post

[Moonshane]

well done Russell! if you bought a brand new guitar, you'd probably tune it before playing?

Newts are just the same and the more you do i the less needs doing each time and the better you get.

it's takes me either 10 seconds (check - yep, ok) or 30 seconds - needs a quick primary tweak.

no reason not to collimate the primary at least before every session. thankfully this is the one that makes the biggest difference too. you have a great scope BTW.

[inksmithy]

I still consider myself an absolute noob at this stuff, but I can honestly say I don't fear collimation any more.

My wife had given me a generic brand 76mm newtonian which was just impossible to use. While in the process of having an ill advised poke at it in an effort to improve matters, my screwdriver made something fall off.

A little panic and a more reasoned search on the internet and I gathered the courage to completely dismantle it and put it together again.

That feeling of satisfaction you get from that quantum leap is good.

A worthy skill to have.

Alan

[Moonshane]

good point Alan.

The design of the newtonian scope is so simple that I have took everything off mine a few times since buying them and also have the confidence to put one together myself from parts.

In fact taking the whole thing apart and rebuilding is for some people (like you clearly) a great way of understanding how things like the cell adjusters and secondary adjusters actually work. I am not advocating that everyone goes ahead and takes apart their newt but if you are averagely competent at DIY, there's no reason you could not do so successfully.

This also allows you to black the edge of the secondary, flock the tube, add a new finder bracket or any of the other jobs you might want to do to improve performance.

[Nova]

Thats a great write up, I too am presently going through the learning process of collimation. Bit scary to start with but as you say its not hard, just need to keep practicing and tweeking. I seem to be developing a bit of an obsession for it though. I have got a friend at work to turn me up a precision engineered collimating cap. Might post up some pics when its done

[swampy]

Thanks for this - great stuff. I know that this is slightly off topic - but do all scopes need collimating? The astro colimator linked to above mentions that the tool can be used with refractors and maks?

[Moonshane]

generally it's newts that need it most. refractors and Maks rarely if ever need collimating (maybe with the exception of the larger 6" ones?) and many/most don't have capacity for it anyway. SCTs can be collimated but not sure again how often if ever it's needed.

[swampy]

Thanks for that. The is a few more quid to another toy ...... if I don't go down the newt route.

[russ.will]

well done Russell! if you bought a brand new guitar, you'd probably tune it before playing?

Newts are just the same and the more you do i the less needs doing each time and the better you get.

it's takes me either 10 seconds (check - yep, ok) or 30 seconds - needs a quick primary tweak.

no reason not to collimate the primary at least before every session. thankfully this is the one that makes the biggest difference too. you have a great scope BTW.

Thanks for that. I was aware that buying a fast Newtonian would require a bit more effort on my part, doubly so because it's my first scope. I figured what the heck; Having never known anything different, it would settle into being part of the only routine I had known and so wouldn't seem like an issue.

Russell