STS Collimation

to be collimating a 10 inch solid tube series telescope today here at teeters telescopes I'm just going to walk everyone through the three major steps of taking your STS telescope and after you've got unpacked now getting it into proper collimation because from vibration and shipping and the rough handling it may have had chances are it will not be in collimation the moment you take it out of the box so we're going to go through the main steps here to bring it in - like I said the proper collimation so first thing we're gonna do is take a look to the focus are here and we're gonna see that the collimation is fairly far out there's some major issues there secondary mirror and primary mirror both out of collimation so what we're gonna do now that we've seen that we could look through the focuser and see it's out of collimation we're going to take this first tool which is the cat's eye two inch sight tube alright so it is a machined sight tube here with a set of crosshairs down on the bottom we're gonna take that and put it your into the focuser drop it all the way in and just lock it down here with the thumb screws and i'm going to take a look through the peephole and we're gonna see again that the collimation is out now to enhance the view we're gonna stick a piece of white computer paper into the tube what that does is it gives us a nice white background behind the secondary mirror so we can better tell how in or out of collimation it is we're gonna zoom in here take a look right through the peephole and we're going to see the secondary mirror and we're gonna see the white paper behind it we're gonna be able to tell some things from this view we can tell that the secondary mirror needs to be rotated because the reflection of the primary mirror is too far toward the top of the secondary mirror so it needs to be rotated and also it just needs general collimation in terms of tip and tilt as we're gonna back out from there again we're gonna take a look through the peephole and to rotate the secondary mirror we're just going to take about just take your hand right in here grab on to the secondary holder here the black part alright not the hub here from the spider but a little bit further in is the secondary mirror holder we're just going to grab that and turn it it just can take a little bit of force we're gonna turn it until we can see the reflection of the primary mirror now centered in the secondary mirror itself okay now what we may want to do is just get a quick look through the peephole here just to see the difference in alignment so rotating the secondary mirror has now brought the primary mirror fairly centered top to bottom now but it's still off-center left to right so in order to correct that now technically in the old days before there were laser collimators and the next couple tools we're gonna talk about you could have just adjusted this by eye that's one way to do it a better way is gonna be with a laser so great all the sight tube here is here to do is just to give you a good concentric view down into the focuser and to see if the secondary mirror is rotated properly and centered this way in all four directions so now we're done with that tool we're gonna take some piece of paper out of the tube and we're now gonna jump to the second tool here which is a two inch laser collimator this one happens to be made by having gladder and we're gonna take this just like the other tool we're going to put this into focus slide it in all the way tighten up the thumb screws yeah we're gonna turn it on now we're gonna take a look down the optical tube here and we're looking for where the ladies error falls on the primary mirror the whole idea here is to get the laser so it falls into the very center of the primary mirror they Center spot their Center a little gum ring or a little decal in the center of the mirror we want to use these three knobs here to adjust the tip and tilt of the secondary mirror we don't want to touch the center one all right that one adjust the tension on the secondary mirror so that one should stay nice and tight doesn't need to be touched but these three we're gonna use now and I'm gonna stick my head in here so you can see that the laser is to the top left on the face of the primary we want to adjust it you know turning these three screws such that it gets to the center of the primary mirror so you can see how we're getting very close here we go here we go it's now on the center spot we want to get in the center there we go so we just keep adjusting and keep turning them till we get them centered or the laser beam centered and we're gonna be pretty close all right I get my head out of the way I think we're fairly centered there to me that would be satisfactory especially for an f5 focal ratio the laser beam is now centered technically now your secondary mirror is in alignment so we're gonna shut the laser off pull the laser out if you're using the the gladder laser tool it has a aperture stop on the base here this white ring here this actually unscrews so we want to take this off and unscrew it set that off to the side and the gladder laser now combines with this other tool this is also from gladder this is called the two inch tube lug tu BLUG to bug all right so what happens here is we have two thumb screws here we're gonna loosen these a little bit so that we can now slide the laser into the tube lug all right so we want to put them in there at the tight the fit is very tight which is good all right so we can tighten that up once that goes in all the way there we go so we want to get the laser fully seated in there this house comes into focus here and it's got a 45-degree cut out here what this allows us to do now is to put this into the focuser with the 45-degree cut out facing you we tighten this up turn it on and now if we swing around this way and we're gonna stand at the rear of the telescope and we're gonna now start working with the primary mirror collimation alright so we look up at the two blog and we see a little red holographic you know laser up there so what we want to do the name of the game here is to take the three collimation bolts on your primary mirror and turn them right to such a degree that what you begin to see on the face of the two blog up there is the shadow of your center spot on the primary mirror in this case we're using the cat's eye hotspot so it looks like a little radioactive symbol sometimes on other telescopes you may have just a gum ring on there but this is a specific shape so we see the shadow of its we want to keep turning this bolts back here on the back of the primary mirror until that shadow is centered on that black hole in the center so that's essentially the origin of the laser so as soon as we get them all lined up here like that and the hole we just D Colome that the hole in the shadow of the center spot is the same size as the origin hole there for the laser so the two overlap perfectly so something like that here so we can see the shadow is now fully centered on this hole right here so we could see we have that so that essentially now let's turn this off pull this out doctor check by looking in here total scopes collimated so we can now point the camera back into the tube here's what we're seeing is a view down the draw tube and we're seeing the sec they're a mirror properly rotated because it's now showing the full primary mirror reflection and centered in the primary mirror reflection is a reflection of the secondary mirror so what we're going for here is all concentric rings so everything is totally concentric we could even then go back to this tool at the very beginning which was the two inch of sight tube plug that back in and see that everything is concentric that concentric to this ring is your secondary mirror and concentric to your secondary mirror is your primary and then again finally concentric is the reflection of the secondary in the primary so basically we're going through a stacked set of images in there meaning that you're now in collimation but really the simpler way to do it is to use your laser tools two inch gladder laser two inch gladder to blood and that brings your telescope into full collimation and that's really it and we did that in a matter of a few minutes your telescope is now fully collimated please enjoy and Oh

Channel: Robert Teeter

Views: 22,668

Keywords: Telescope, Telescopes, Collimation, Teeter, Teeters, Teeter's, CatsEye, Glatter

Id: lsUXhAnnzAc

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 12 2014