We all know that collimating a telescope that has multiple curved mirrors is Black Magic. I’ve tried it and I can happily confirm I am… not a witch.
Here’s a 400mm f/20 Classic Cassegrain. The primary mirror is a parabola and the secondary is a hyperbola. And if you do the maths, the focal length really is 8000mm!
The last stage of manufacturing for this monster was collimation. To do this, Catalin (definitely a wizard) set it up on a bench so it was facing a flat mirror on the wall opposite. Using an artificial star and a beam splitter, he sent a beam of light from the eyepiece, bouncing off the secondary, back to the primary, out to the flat mirror, back to the primary, then the secondary and through the beam splitter to the eyepiece. This allowed him to align the telescope on the bench first, and then to adjust the mirrors.
The scope has now been crated up and shipped off to its new owner in Europe.
Sampling rates can make your stars good or blocky, especially if you zoom in. It all depends on a few factors like your focal length, the size of the pixels in your sensor, how good the atmospheric conditions are, and even how good your guiding is. This article shows how to get a combination of telescope and camera that will give you nice smooth stars under a range of conditions.
This is an instalment of a tutorial series on how to slave a dome. In this part we look at connecting the dome control software to the dome and mount through the ASCOM Hub. Depending on the connections you can perform the slaving calculations in the dome control software or the ASCOM Hub.
In this second part of the dome slaving series, we discuss connecting your observatory control program directly to the dome and the mount using ASCOM drivers. This is the simplest we to set it up, and allows you to use the observatory control program to do the slaving calculations.
