Where am I going wrong

[Yimini]

I had my second attempt last night at collimating my Skywatcher Explorer 200P, and once again got stuck when it came to aligning the secondary mirror. I have managed to position the mirror so that it looks like a perfect circle, but I am only able to see the clips that hold the primary mirror if I have no eyepiece present at all. I have tried using a 35mm film case and I now have a Cheshire Collimator, but in both cases when inserted the aperture does not appear to be wide enough to show all three clips at once.

Having decided that I wanted to push on anyway I tried lining up the clips with no eyepiece in at all and then moved on to the primary mirror. I believe at this point that I should be trying to line up the black dot, with the circle and the cross hairs of the collimator? I believe I have succeeded in doing this, but the cross hairs appear to be completely out of focus, making it very difficult to get an accurate alignment. Am I doing something wrong here? This is not helped by the vanes holding the secondary mirror in place which are also do a very good impression of cross hairs themselves.

Having got this far, is there any chance that I might have lined everything up sufficiently to be able to use my scope now? Or do I have to get the secondary mirror correct to have any hope of using it?

Many Thanks.

[Merlin66]

I think you're certainly close enough to start observing!!

Go for it.

[basher0010]

check out the tutorial sction Dion has a couple of excellent posts regarding collimation good luck dude..

[Hobbes]

I re-collimated my scope recently while solar observing and found that with the solar filter on the end of the tube the whole process was a lot easier - far fewer distracting objects.

[Tinker1947]

Have you tried moving the focusor in or out to see the primary clips.

[Yimini]

I tried moving the focuser, but to no real effect

[Yimini]

I was fortunate enough last night to get about an hour of reasonable viewing time. The sky had light patchy cloud and there was some light misty cloud. Despite this I was able to spend about fifty percent of my time viewing Mars. I first viewed it through my 25mm lens, then a 10mm, than the same 10mm with a 2 x Barlow, i.e. the standard eye piece set you get with the Skywatcher 200P. I found I was able to see Mars reasonably clearly and although I was not able to make out any detail I discern that the planet was not a uniform colour. When using the 25mm, I could clearly see that Mars was a disc, but it had more of a star burst effect (I hope that makes sense). This only happened on this strength of lens.

So my question(s), following on from my original post is whether this is the effect of bad collimation or a symptom of something else? Was the fact that I could not get detail on Mars down to collimation, bad viewing, or would another 2 x Barlow sort out the issue?

After about 30 minutes, Mars became too misted over and I moved on to The Moon and experienced some real jaw dropping moments (for a newbie). I was astounded at the amount of detail I could make out, and was even able to navigate about The Moon’s surface (at a very simple level). I could get everything in very sharp focus here, so is that a sign that perhaps my collimation is not so bad after all?

[Tribal-Wolf]

With the supplied 10mm lens you probably won't get much of any detail because it's not very good tbh. If it wasn't great seeing conditions that would also go against it. Mars is not the easiest to make out at the best of times.