Focusing and Collimation Exercises with Deneb (Jerry Yesavage)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg) · Contains: The star Deneb (αCyg)

Focusing and Collimation Exercises with Deneb

In my long saga trying to get my Takahashi 180 ED properly collimated, once I got it reasonably well into the 17 micro target zone I realized focus was critical. In the past I had used RoboFocus but the apparatus would no longer fit on my system (see my atavar) as the backfocus with my STT 8300M is too short and there is no room to attach to the Tak microfocuser.

So what I have done is every night I focus on a bright star and use my laser cut Bahtinov mask and the Bahtinov Grabber software. Using this I can get probably to within 5-10 microns depending on the seeing (you can watch it go in and out in the software, but eventually you get a mean over 15s).

Unfortunately with the weight of the camera and temperature changes the focus will go out over the night usually 10-20 micros.

I thought I would put this up if it might be of use to anyone.

Cloudy Nights

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Status	Advanced failed
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Astrometry.net job	401999
PixInsight job	317IJHCTFRBHRDPLU9C84V5DTQG2FYMD
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	PLATE_SOLVING_IMAGE

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Focusing and Collimation Exercises with Deneb

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