Ad Astra Observatory

I spent some time this afternoon tuning Trixie. The collimation job is a but tougher with the open-frame scope; each turnbuckle is a collimation adjustment point. It took a lot of tweaking to get the scope to hold collimation in all points of the sky. I got close, but it will take some more work.

I shot a couple of test images to see what was up, and was getting some very strange star images in-focus. I was trying to get a shot of M42 to show off, but decided to take an out-of-focus image of one of the stars in Orion’s belt to demonstrate the problem I’m seeing:

Looks like the optics might not be centered in the tube. More tuning required.