Collimation and a hoop

Had another clear night. I got setup, and decided to have a go at collimating the Skymax. What a pain that proved to be. Firstly, the little Mak has 6 collimation screws, 3 x 3mm and 3 x 2mm using Allen keys to adjust. That makes it tricky to start with, in the day, when you can see what you are doing. At night, that's just painful. Still with the near full moon up, it was quite bright. I started on the moon, to focus and ensure the finder was aligned, as using the QHY5v and a 2x barlow made the FOV of the Skymax particularly small (so small, that an out of focus Betelgeuse filled the screen), then slewed across to Betelgeuse, conveniently close by. I've gotta say, that using EQMOD and a game controller made this really easy. Anyway, I took the Mak in and out of focus and confirmed my suspicions, the rings were not concentric. So, I started in on collimation. Then realised I'd forgotten the instructions, so dug them out and started over. After the first set of adjustments, Betelguese was nowhere to be seen on screen, and no amount of wandering about could find it. I went back to the moon, and realigned the finder, and back to the star. And repeat, and repeat, and repeat. After about 1.5 hours of this, most of the time spent trying to find the star again, the rings were as concentric as I could make them by eye on the laptop screen, and I could no longer feel the Allen keys as I was using them. Needless to say, this is not a good idea and I kept dropping them. Oh, I should point out, the lack of sensation was down to the cold.

At this point, I decided I'd have a go at creating a mosaic of the terminator with the 2x barlow. So off I set. Some time later, and I'd captured 28 panes of the terminator, seems rather a lot, but hey, the shivers were getting silly, it was a bit cold and all the layers I'd stacked on just weren't keep the cold out anymore. So I cleared up.

I was amazed at the difference in the resulting images on each pane..

Here's an example, compare this to Bailly from the previous session...



I've got some odd lines in the image, I'm not sure why, but it might be a setting or interference from a power lead, or a number of things, and that'll be something for another night to work out. Anyway... after processing each pane and mosaicing it, I got a far larger image than I'd anticipated.



Click for full size.

I'm very happy with the result, and would like to try a full mosaic using the barlow, but that's for another time and plenty of it. I'm going to need to find some hard disk space too.

The following morning, with the moon low in the sky and the sun not yet risen, I spotted the moon framed in the trees