[ATM] ATM: "The Laser People"

[bobmay at nethere.com (Bob May)]

The process of collimation is not hard to do or understand.  The problem is
that there are several ways of doing it (like a lot of other stuff in
telescope work) and some people can't seem to keep each method seperate in
their minds.  IN addition, the philosophy of what is being done isn't
usually mentioned in the instructions so the steps (some of one process and
some of another process) are done by rote stepping and often the results
aren't spectacurly better than before due to the lack of knowledge of what
things really should look like in the eyepiece as well as poor surfaces to
begin with.
The first thing to remember with any collimation is that it is a process of
aligning the optics to where they are working as advertised.  Newtonian
optics need merely to get the axis of the parabola to hit the center of the
eyepiece.  Towards that end, the focuser must travel up and down that axis
(most put that axis as perpendicular to the tube axis) and point towards the
secondary so that it reflects the most light possible from its location (the
off-axis vs. centered philosopy in effect here) and thus down the tube and
back up again to the sky.  All else is guilding on the lilly of life.
The laser people think that they have the solution but they still do a lot
of prework to insure that the optics are all setup right to begin with and
the laser just does a little bit of final tweaking that may or may not be
really correct anyway.
Bob May
http://nav.to/bobmay
bobmay@nethere.com
NEW! http://bobmay.astronomy.net