The mak needs collimated

[Bottletopburly]

Fired up the mak 127mm last night  not the best start managed to find rough focus enough to plate solve over to Deneb to focus using bahtinov mask , then skewed to Saturn popping in the Barlow , could hardly make out Saturn , tried various settings gain etc I came to the conclusion collation is out due to a school boy error last week and refitting focus knob forgetting to pay ota horizontal and seeing mirror slip 🤬 anyway stripped down and sorted but by the look of it collimation is out so hopefully I will redo the collimation with the help of an adapted torch and a fibre optic cable that shows a pinprick of light , focussing not as easy with a mak as you don’t know where the focus point is roughly compared to a Newtonian focuser so a wasted  good night of imaging .

[+Graham]

I gave up on Saturn last night David because the seeing was so bad that low down

[philjay]

I may be teaching granny etc but if a Mak isnt aclimated the tube currents play havoc with the image. Many is the time when I have thought the maks I had (180 ' 127) were out only to find the next time out they were bang on.

 

From experience, make sure when you check collimation on a star that you do it without diagonal as that can introduce errors.

 

Also maks are very robust so they dont drift out of collimation, it usually takes a trauma of some type, has it been dropped?

[Bottletopburly]

7 minutes ago, philjay said:

I may be teaching granny etc but if a Mak isnt aclimated the tube currents play havoc with the image. Many is the time when I have thought the maks I had (180 ' 127) were out only to find the next time out they were bang on.

 

From experience, make sure when you check collimation on a star that you do it without diagonal as that can introduce errors.

 

Also maks are very robust so they dont drift out of collimation, it usually takes a trauma of some type, has it been dropped?

Hi Phil yes I had been living on the mount this week so should have been ok  maybe a bit of everything certainly slipping the mirror didn’t help I should have popped over to Jupiter and seen how that looked , very rusty on planetary been years since I tried which is why I got the mak which I picked up for a £100,a few years ago 

[+Ibbo]

To confirm seeing was not good last night.