C 11 needs professional colmination .....dooooh

OK I tried to make a good situation better only to make a good situation worse...........

The image on my C-11 wasn't all it could be so I tried colminating it myself with some helpful Heloise information I found on the Celestron site and elsewhere on the web.

Unfortunately it appears I've made a bad situation much worse and now the scope will not resolve stars and planets, and even the moon which was perfect last night is soft and fuzzy. When looking at stars they look like shuttlecocks from badmitten.

Can anybody suggest a strategy a novice can follow, or suggest someone in the NYC Long Island area that can perform this so I don't have to ship the bloody thing back to Celestron for professional servicing :S

When one tightens a screw on the mirror housing, the other two should be loosened, each about half of the amount the one was tightened. Sounds as if you kept tightening, or loosening, screws without maintaining the average tension on the mirror housing, now the housing is, most likely, too tight making for the funny images. GENTLY loosen things up and see if you can find a happy medium, preferrably with an experienced amateur there to assist you.

Good luck.

What I found useful was a porch light about 2 miles away, somewhat up a hillside. I used it as an artificial star and it worked quite well. I adjusted until I got a nice set of rings and then gave it a look, perfect!

Dave:

How about contacting your local astronomy club, there is probably someone there who would be more than happy to help you. Or, if you are lucky, a fellow Astromarter might be close enough to help you out.

Jon

dave raw said:

OK I tried to make a good situation better only to make a good situation worse...........

Yeah. Seek out your local astronomy club--if you haven't done so already--and enlist the services of an SCT User there to help you. They'll be glad to. That said, SCT collimation is easy. Perhaps you just need a different set of instructions:

http://skywatch.brainiac.com/SCThp/collimation.pdf

8)

dave raw said:

......suggest someone in the NYC Long Island area that can perform this so I don't have to ship the bloody thing back to Celestron for professional servicing :S

I know that the owner of Optical Guidance Systems has collimated the SCTs owned by guys in his local astronomy club for free by putting the tube on the same rig OGS uses to collimate their RCs before shipment. It should only take a few minutes and OGS (located just north west of Philly) should be a reasonable day trip for you. You can even go take a look at the Liberty Bell!

George N