Thread: Focusing issue
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Old 18-01-2021, 08:00 PM
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mental4astro (Alexander)
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Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: sydney, australia
Posts: 4,979
Rusty,

Remember this, many, most if not all professional observatories use lasers to collimate their instruments, but the final proof and tweaking is always done by start testing. It is the ultimate proof and validation. It is something that we can take from the Big Boys of astro and apply directly ourselves as amateurs with our scopes

Here's one tip to help collimating your SCT:
* Look at the secondary mirror, and with three little tabs of masking tape put one tab on the edge of the OTA to mark the corresponding location of each screw.
* Next put another three little tabs of masking tape down on the outer edge of the primary mirror cell to match the tabs on the top of the OTA.
* When looking through the high power eyepiece (it MUST be a high power eyepiece for collimation purposes), figure out a tab you would like to shift and then you can easily translate this to the secondary's colli screws AND keep track of which colli screw you just adjusted.

Alex.
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