UT Jul 18, 2022: A bit of collimation for the 12-inch

Michael Richmond
Jul 18, 2022

On the night of July 18/19, 2022, under mediocre conditions, I made small adjustments to the collimation of the Meade LX200 12-inch telescope.

Using the integrating video camera, I examined the out-of-focus appearance of the star Arcturus. Before making any adjustments, it looked pretty good. I thought that perhaps the annulus around 2 o'clock was a bit on the thin side, and that around 8 o'clock on the thick side.

So, I made a few small adjustments to one of the collimation screws on the front of the secondary support, and achieved what appears to be a slightly more symmetric shape:

I didn't connect the CMOS camera to take any images of stars in focus, however. I'll leave that for another night.