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ATM 10" Problems
Greetings all. Need some advice on a
10" scope I recently completed. I'm having problems getting a decent
view from it. There are a number of things I'd like to know about, but let
me start with the quality of the view with a 21mm eyepice (my...largest?).
While I can focus things in relatively sharp (good enough for casual viewing),
there are distinct flares of light from the larger stars and most stars have
little "spikes" of light radiating from them in a direction that's
dependent on my position over the eyepiece. Also, with my smaller eyepiece
(8mm) the degradation of the view is tremendous.
Perhaps a few specifics are in order: the
mirror was puchased from Coultier Optical. It's a 10"/f4.7 mirror and
was supplied with a 2.51" diagonal. The primary rests on 9 points
that are adjustable at three points - each adjustment post floats a triangle of
three contact points on the mirror.
Alignment of the mirrors was done with a
collimation tool from Orion Optical. Looking through the peephole you see
crosshairs over a ring of light reflected in from the side. Manual
adjustment lines up the crosshairs, light ring, and both mirrors as good as can
be expected (everything appears to be in line, right down the center).
Also, higher magnifications turn everything distinctly yellowish.
I recall seeing a view of Saturn thourgh a
professional 16" observatory telescope that was just breathtaking.
While I would not expect to see that through a 4" scope, I would expect
some sort of linear increase in performance between the two. I.e., my
10" scope acts more like a 4".
Is there further alignment that needs to be
done? Is there something I overlooked? I've read and reread
Texereau's book and don't think I've missed anything (I could be wrong).
Is this as good a performance that I can expect out of my 10"?
That's about as specific as I can think to be
without some repsonses asking specific questions. This is my first scope
and while I'm proud of how it turned out, I think it should be better. Am
I off base?
Thanks in advance.