Saimons Astronomy

Michael DUBOIS (https://www.michaeldubois.be/astronomie) has done some great work by collimating his dobsonian telescope, 305 mm Explore Scientific with focal length of 1525 mm, with Collimation Circles applicaton.

I'm glad to announce that new version of Collimation Circles application is available. See below whats new or changed in this release:

After modifying secondary mirror holder in my previous blog post, I have decided that next modification will be primary mirror mask.

This is the part three of the series about Advanced Newtonian Telescope Collimation. Here are Part 1 and Part 2.

This is the part two of the series about Advanced Newtonian Telescope Collimation. Part 1 is available here.

The image on the left shows the really precise centering of the secondary mirror on the center of the back of the telescope tube. Why is it centered on the back of the telescope tube and not on the center of the primary mirror, you ask? Because it is much easier to center the secondary mirror if you remove the primary mirror first.

If you are thinking of modifying your Newtonian telescope, the first thing you will find on Google and YouTube videos is how to replace your secondary spider for 150mm or 130mm telescopes. That's great, you go to printables.com or thingverse.com, download a suitable model for your telescope and 3D print it.

I very happy to anounce, that new version of Colimation Circles 3.1.0 is available. It is not big release, but I think it's important one. It brings support for UVC and Raspberry Pi camera background video stream. Colimation your telescope should now be even easier. No more thinkering with third party application to provide video stream.

At last! After intensive testing, refactoring, UI/UX optimizations and the addition of new features, Collimation Circles version 3.0 is finally here.

I was using Raspberry PI OS Bullseye 64bit for a while now to control my telescope. Though it was running flawlesly, I have decided it is time to try new Bookworm version. I folowed my previous article Get Raspberry PI INDI server up and running and updated it to be Bookworm compatible. I have added GPSD instalation instructions because I think it was really game changer for astrophotography setup.

lately I noticed strange deformations on my Raspberry PI HQ Camera IR filter that looked like little cracks. I start to investigate what could be the cause of this and found this article. My case was a little diferent though. There were no boubles but deformation looked more like cracks.