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Collimation?

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Posted by William Herschell on January 4, 2002 19:01:51 UTC

Hello and happy New Year everyone!

I'm new to reflector telescopes, having purchased a DS114 recently. The first thing I did was upgrade to 1.25" eyepieces and do a lot of reading about newtonians. Something critical seems to be the colliamtion and I read a FAQ that describes the final step as the star test.

The collimation FAQ is:
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~mbartels/kolli/kolli.html

Step 7 in the faq is to do a Star Test.

I mean by the star test is the one
described at this link:
http://hometown.aol.com/billferris/startest2.html

I built a home made colimator as per:
http://www.starastronomy.org/TelescopeMaking/perkins.html

I then tweeked with the vanes until I was sure that I could see the whole primary in the secondary. No further adjustment seemed to be
needed with the secondary screws. Then I aligned the cross hairs with the center spot of the primary. and finnaly I aligned the primary to
reflect the secondary concentric with the crosshairs and the dot. I can't see anything inside the reflection of the secondary as it it too dark, but I think I can make out my own eye and centered that too. I did this with the focuser "travelling out" if I do it with the
focuser "travelling in" things get out of alignment. Just have to remember to focus on the way out always. Then I did the star test
(only for collimation) and the rings look pretty concentric as far as I can tell.

The problem is that nothing looks good through the telescope. Stars have heavy coma and planets look double. When I look in the focuser without the eyepiece everythig looks as aligned as can be. But things looked a lot better before all the collimation. What is wrong?

Someone please help.

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