Well , the long weekend was great here , 3 perfect nights so I had the frakensaxon out all 3 .
On the second night it was cooler than we have had for what seems like ever and noticed a bit more SA on the out of focus stars
I wonder .
I took off the dew shield and grabbed a 3mm allen key and phillips head screwdriver and had a go at a little lens colimation , cant really hurt now , can it ?? .
fast forward 1/4 hour and no amount of adjustments made any difference to the SA that was showing ?? it was worse than last week by a fair margin , ok .
.
I took the ota into the shed for a better look and putting it on the table and rolling it a bit I heard a faint rattle
YES ! I know what that is , and mounting the ota on a mount in the shed and putting the lens pointing straight up looking at the retaining ring and YES
it was loose so a few light taps on the cell to settle it back in place as I snugged it up and then setting the colimation screws back to zero position I was back out and after a few attempts had the lens perfectly aligned and what a difference , almost perfect intra and extra rings showing a 90% improvement of the SA , just a little colour in the centre rings but that all but disappares in focus , just a perfect aeiry dick with the faintest of rings around it .
That beautiful Vixen SP mount is a sweet mount , when alligned south well it keeps the object dead centre for 1/2 an hour or more at over 200x and this makes colimation easy , just a touch of a direction button to re-centralize after a tweek , very nice .
The CA was also a lot better in focus , none seen on 3-4th mag stars , just a little on 2nd mag and even Rigel at over 1st was pretty clean with it's companion very easily seen , very good .
Jupiter and saturn were awesome at 200-250x , Mars was ok , getting better all the time . The tripezium was so good at 200x I just took it in for a long time until it got a little low in the west .
I knew this was a good achromat but its even better now after a little maintiance and my advise , if you suspect there is a problem with colimation , even with a doublet refractor don't be shy to have a go , it can make a huge difference .
Brian.