[ribuck (Richard)]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the replies. I have the focuser tilt ring. my 1st step is always to align the focuser with the optical axis of the scope with a laser using the focuser collimation ring, followed by alignment of the secondary and final tweaks of the Primary, and then subsequent iterations to fine tune.

Glen,

I consider myself suitably reprimanded and i do understand your frustration about newbies, that said I did read through many tutorials and watched many video's on the topic. The reason i posted and asked for advice was because none of the tutorials covered the issues that i was seeing and none of it made sense, rather than not understanding the process.

Unfortunately to achieve the correct focus with my tak collimating scope i need to extend it around 2" inches and it appears to have an awful lot of slop in the tube, which i have found is common after researching the issue. This slop resulted in the optical anomaly where the secondary donut reflection appeared offset and before i understood about the slop issue, it made it appear that the optics weren't properly collimated so i was trying to compensate for it by tweaking the collimation.

Now that i know that the issue is down to the tak collimating scope, i should be fine with the collimation process, and now just waiting for a bit of clear sky to test the collimation and do final tweaks on the primary.

Many thanks for all the help.

Rich.