Hi All,
Well, can anyone guess who is a happy chappy today?
Picked up my replacement OTA and while there I got them to fix the faulty Altitude scale on the EQ2 which was 5 degrees out of whack.
I checked the scope before I left the warehouse with my cheshire and it was pretty close. I also got my collimation charge refunded as discussed before.
I came home, put it all together and waited for the clouds to disappear and then took it out the back and had a play.
The collimation was still a bit crook and I thought I was done for, but then I focused on a bright star, tracked the EQ2 and wound the focuser right out as far as it could go and did some TINY adjustments to the alignment of the primary on the spider image in the EP.
This allowed me to see a similar image to the Cheshire image and was quite easy to see which way the primary needed to go.
After a few tries and some fine tuning, I wound it back to focus and found I had NO coma, NO chromatic abberations and almost "perfect" focus with fine point stars and details on Jupiter!
The old scope must have had some additional problems with the corrector lens as I everything the same with it and never got it this good!
So, with some
actual focus ability I tracked Jupiter at 200x and tried a few AVI's with the Afocal adapter.
Visually the view has improved 100% and I am rapt with it now. The quality and ease of photos using the point and shoot digital camera is a bit of a pain though so I dont know how long I will stick with this method. After a bit the fog and dew closed in anyway so I packed it all up and headed in to watch some 20/20 cricket and process my avi files.
Here is a shot from one of the captures. Its not too bad compared to some of my other ones. Taken at 14:21 UT at 200x using Pentax Optio S7 at VGA mode stacked 555 frames in registax and sharpened in Gimp. Seeing 8/10 and transparency of about 4.5/5.
All in all, it has been a real pain, but at least now I am pretty much an expert at how to collimate and have learnt
heaps about how everything fits together. I am just glad the dramas are over for now......
Thanks again for all the comments and support from those who read this thread, I appreciate it.
Cheers
Chris