The importance of keeping the Newt horizontal when faffing about.

[Laurieast]

Had the Explorer 150p on the AVX indoors, and thought I would check the collimation. So rotated it to a vertical position for ease of access to the eyepiece. 

Went to pop in the collimation cap, and somehow did not notice that in the draw tube was a 2"/42mm adapter and not a 1.25" , so the cap left my fingertips and rolled along the draw tube, departed that and spun off in my view through the secondary down the tube toward the primary, it was just like watching  astronauts spin things across a cabin, it hit the primary and bounced 😱

Something black was on the mirror but it fell off when I rotated the tube to get the cap out, so it must have just been dust or plastic from the cap, I can't see any marks on the mirror, but won't be doing that again!

 

 

 

[markse68]

very good advice and glad it didn’t turn out to be the disaster it could so easily have been

Mark

[banjaxed]

The person who has never made a mistake has not yet been born 😀

[callisto]

You learn from your mistakes

[Tiny Clanger]

31 minutes ago, callisto said:

You learn from your mistakes

Yep, but it's cheaper and less harrowing to learn from someone else's 🙂