How to Align your Newtonian Telescope Mirrors

hi folks today we are going to learn how to adjust the primary secondary mirror Optics in your Newtonian telescope this is a similar telescope that we use here at the club and you'll find that you'll want to do that before every observing session to make sure your Optics are clear and you get the best views possible so very quickly we want to align the Optics in our Newtonian telescope if you look at this diagram here you can see the white path the primary mirror coax all the light reflects it to the secondary mirror on a 45 degree angle and then it reaches your eye or your camera why do you want to call me well you want your Optics to be as aligned as possible so you get as good an image as possible for that night you can see when your Optics are not aligned you get blurry images as opposed to clear images so again here's the light path and with a laser combinator we will be using a laser beam so the beam will come down where your focuser is reflect off the secondary to the primary back to the secondary and back to the Target so you when you tend to look at your telescope it'll look misaligned oftentimes because it gets jostled and this is what you might see looking down the draw tube first uh you'll adjust your secondary mirror and then your primary mirror your Optics will then be aligned again your collimator will go right in where your eyepiece goes your adjustment screws are in the front for the secondary mirror and in the back for the primary okay once again really quickly uh with the laser in you will see a of the beam go down and looking in front into telescope you will see the secondary uh mirror uh sorry uh shoot down the primary you will put the laser in the middle of that donut at the bottom of the mirror go around the back of the telescope look at the Target and adjust your primary mirror so your um your laser gets Target hits the middle of the Target and both beams then cross over and you have perfect column so here we will show you how to line up the telescope you can see that the collimator the laser is off the return beam is off the target first thing we have to do is look down into where the secondary mirror is and you can see that it is off Target so you have to adjust the secondary mirror first with one of these screws it'll either be a screw or a Allen key and you just adjust it until it comes back and hits the bullseye like so so now your secondary mirror is lined up you can look in there now that Target is right in the center so we know now a secondary mirror is collimated let me go back to the primary mirror on the back side and you can see that the target is still off we want to get centered so how do we do that we go down here to primary mirror adjustment screws and we adjust the primary mirror while looking at the Target and sure enough the bullseye has been centered and you can see that it has clearly gone in into the bullseye Target area your telescope is now collimated all right everyone hopefully everyone knows how to use one of these now see you on the observing field

Channel: Mark Zdziarski

Views: 1,672

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Id: s70DKCr7y5I

Length: 3min 51sec (231 seconds)

Published: Wed May 10 2023