Quote:
Originally Posted by DavidU
Lovely detailed descriptions as always Sab. I take it that the mirror is now giving it's best as the cooling and collimation are up to par with the SDM treatment.
|
Thanks David, glad you enjoyed! My secondary could use a bit of tweaking, but always forget and it's hard to do in the dark! But yeah the observing has greatly improved since the addition of fans and I've noticed a very noticable improvement in the views since conversion to SDM. The reasons for this:
- active cooling
- accurate collimation of both mirrors via laser and cheshire...before the secondary was nearly impossible to adjust and was never sure if both the optical and mechanical alignment was accurate (unlikely)
-collimation stays dead on all night, not lateral mirror shift at all, also the old scope it would wonder up to 10mm from horizon to zenith, this has been reduced to about 1mm.
-Much better mirror cell, the original was unventilated, plus without fans it never reached equilibrium.
I observed M42 during the session and was blown away, like other familar targets it appeared much more vivid, detailed, brighter and fainter stars could be seen than in the old scope.