It’s been a few months since I started using my childhood telescope again but I’m pleased to report that with a little effort I’ve seen some amazing things in the night sky.
The first step in getting the telescope back to optimum condition was to make sure that the mirrors were all aligned. This process is called collimation and is something which is particular to Newtonian Reflector telescopes. A telescope which is not collimated won’t give the sharpest views so this is important to do, especially as my telescope is about 15 years old and has been transported between the various places I’ve lived in that time! I was also keen to remove the mirror to check whether it needed cleaning or was damaged at all.
As with my last blog post, here are some links to videos I found useful to achieve this:
Both these channels have some incredible content and I have binged for hours watching their tutorials.
After removing the mirror and blowing the dust off it, I could see that there was some slight damage to the edges of the mirror. It was however fairly clean so I didn’t clean the mirror with soapy water as detailed in the video above.
Refitting the mirror led to collimation. There are various types of collimation tools ranging from simple collimation caps to laser collimators. I opted for this one as it seemed to be a good balance of quality and cost and was well reviewed:
https://www.firstlightoptics.com/other-collimation-tools/premium-cheshire-collimating-eyepiece.html
Here are some before and after pictures when looking through the collimation device:
Whilst I didn’t take any before and after photos of the resulting view, I do now find that stars are significantly sharper. I also got some incredible views of Jupiter and Saturn.
With the image much improved, now the most limiting part of my setup is the mount. It’s very lightweight and the telescope wobbles around on it – the worst thing is that allows the telescope to drop whilst observing which makes it incredibly frustrating to use and almost impossible to accurately track objects in the night sky. Next steps are a mount upgrade and probably some kind of upgraded finder setup.