[BC]

I feel I shouldn't be asking such newbie questions after almost a year since getting my scope, but hey. I've played with collimation many times and have been fairly confident that I have been doing OK. I've seen the cassini division and GRS and Jupiter's moon shadows on the planet, but basic stars have never been the way people describe them. Any brightness to the star transforms into a bright flair, until 2 nights ago. I hadn't collimated because it really doesn't seem to change that much and suddenly, bright stars looked like very small bits of light with 4 very slender, pure streaks of light, which of course come from the spider veins. This looked like the people always describe stars, so I'm wondering, does this mean that I have never really had "good" collimation? And that this time when the scope's collimation went "out", in fact it moved into a very good position? Do you get the 4 streaks even when seeing is bad?

Thanks very much for your thoughts,
Bruce