cleaning questar

newby need advise. bought an 01 3.5 questar with bb coating used from an old guy. dust in finder mirror. dirty top diagonal and all the surfaces I can reach. slight white haze medium power daylight terrestrial viewing. main mirror looks clean as does secondary mirror. can I take the back off and clean this up or would you send this to questar? no reference to what is normal how to know other than it gets better when I clean the surfaces I can get to. any tests to check transmission? look at moon? thanks for any ones help to a beginner

Robert: My own 3.5-inch Questar is over 30 years old, and maybe my advice won't count for the more recent model you have. But for what it's worth, I would advise that you contact Questar (I have found them very user-friendly) and find out whether you should send them your scope for cleaning, and what what it would take to do that.
The following quotes are from the manual that came with my old telescope: "Never unscrew the barrel of the telescope or touch the primary mirror for any reason. . . . On ordinary lenses, or even on most precision optics, small sleeks may be polished out, thinning the lens within manufacturing tolerances. But superfine optics like Questar's have no such generous margin for error. Each Questar is an individual triumph of the optician's art, achieved by aspheric hand retouching of matched elements during a long series of performance tests. . .[etc., etc.]" Good luck with your new scope.