M24 and Collimation Gone Wrong

M24, Orion Parsec 8300M, 4x10 sec, f/6.3, fl 3048,

12" aperture, luminance filter, 1x1 bin, no auto guide,

no AO, 6/5/2011 1:08 AM EST, Webster, NY
© Billy Vazquez VAO(Vazquez Astronomical Observatory)

Messier 24 is not really a stellar object but a bunch of stars along the spiral arms of the Milky Way that happen to be all bunched up along the line of sight nicely without stuff to block the light coming from them (aka. extinction).  Last night I chose this nice field of stars to test how bad the collimation of my Meade LX200 12" telescope is. And boy is it bad!  

First, you might ask, what is collimation? Well if you click the link you can get all the cool details about it, but in a nutshell it is the proper alignment of all the optics in a telescope.  How do I know my telescope is not correctly collimated?  Well click on the image to the right and see for yourself.  The stars are supposed to be nice round dots.  Instead, M24 stars look like bloated egg shaped, non uniform blobs of light!   That is just not right!

So you may ask, what can I do about it?  I need to collimate (align) the optics of my telescope.  For SCT's there are typically  3 screws in the center of the corrector plate that holds the secondary mirror in place.  These screws need to be adjusted to obtain a nice round star shape when in focus.  So what causes the misalignment?  Vibrations, bumping against the telescope, transporting the telescope, basically any movement of the telescope eventually can throw off the alignment.  Stay tuned to the blog and I will bring you the results of my collimation and hopefully a better image of M24, with more information about how I will fix this issue.