Collimation Confusion

[squeaky]

Remember I messed up late on Sunday? A final tweak that turned into a nightmare with essentially a runaway feedback on errors.

Re-did all the collimation by hand and even re-checked the collimation of my laser. At which point, barely having started collimating the thing, the batteries died. New batteries inserted. WOT?!?!?!?!? The new dot on my wall was MILES away from the low battery one! Finished collimating the laser and decided that since I had finally got everything looking just fine on the Cheshire - if the laser disagreed by more than the distance between a gnats eyeballs I'd give it a miss. As it turned out it was very close and came in nicely.

Managed to do a star test at long last.

It was just a bit lopsided, so I took a chance that it was temperature changes and being at a viewing angle and eased the secondary in using the laser then used the dot and the barlow routine on the primary. Spot on with tiny changes but I assume that now the Cheshire view will look off. Anyway - had a look at my star and there it was. Not only nice and round but I had one of those concentric dark circles in there as well. First time ever!

I'm thinking that from now on I'll check collimation with a star test and only do changes if the defocussed star goes oval or lopsided - and then only adjust the primary if I can get away with it.

All I have to do now is invent a stasis chamber so that I never have to do this again.

[umadog]

Sounds good!

[squeaky]

Sounds good!

I'm hoping so. I won't know until I can get some decent images. I certainly couldn't tell that my collimation was slightly off by eye; nor from the camera images. Right after breakfast I'll be working on my dob base - it's very stiff to turn as I said in the Sunny Suffolk thread.

Fingers crossed for tonight.