Saimons Astronomy

After modifying secondary mirror holder in my previous blog post, I have decided that next modification will be primary mirror mask.

This is the part three of the series about Advanced Newtonian Telescope Collimation. Here are Part 1 and Part 2.

This is the part two of the series about Advanced Newtonian Telescope Collimation. Part 1 is available here.

The image on the left shows the really precise centering of the secondary mirror on the center of the back of the telescope tube. Why is it centered on the back of the telescope tube and not on the center of the primary mirror, you ask? Because it is much easier to center the secondary mirror if you remove the primary mirror first.

If you are thinking of modifying your Newtonian telescope, the first thing you will find on Google and YouTube videos is how to replace your secondary spider for 150mm or 130mm telescopes. That's great, you go to printables.com or thingverse.com, download a suitable model for your telescope and 3D print it.

I very happy to anounce, that new version of Colimation Circles 3.1.0 is available. It is not big release, but I think it's important one. It brings support for UVC and Raspberry Pi camera background video stream. Colimation your telescope should now be even easier. No more thinkering with third party application to provide video stream.

At last! After intensive testing, refactoring, UI/UX optimizations and the addition of new features, Collimation Circles version 3.0 is finally here.

I was using Raspberry PI OS Bullseye 64bit for a while now to control my telescope. Though it was running flawlesly, I have decided it is time to try new Bookworm version. I folowed my previous article Get Raspberry PI INDI server up and running and updated it to be Bookworm compatible. I have added GPSD instalation instructions because I think it was really game changer for astrophotography setup.

lately I noticed strange deformations on my Raspberry PI HQ Camera IR filter that looked like little cracks. I start to investigate what could be the cause of this and found this article. My case was a little diferent though. There were no boubles but deformation looked more like cracks.

Yesterday, raspberrypi.com announced a new version of the operating system for the Raspberry Pi. The new version is called Bookworm and it has one big change that will have a big impact on how the Collimation Circles application works on this new system. The old OS Bullseye used X11 as the window manager, but the new version switched to Wayland. And this is really good news for Collimation Circles. Transparency now works out of the box! No more tinkering with the settings. You launch the application and it just works! I'm really excited about that! It was really major drawback! But not anymore! Yeeeeeah!

This is where my journey into telescope collimation began. It's all started with this great AstroBaby tutorial. In my opinion it's really the best Newtonian reflector collimation tutorial out there. I have seen a lot of them, but everyone of them contains to many opinionated information. This tutorial is just plain as it it can be. At first sight it may seem complicated, but you should really take your time and go through it step by step. You will get to know your telescope better and you will get comfortable tinkering with it.