Laser collimator for SCT?

Hello Group,
I am considering purchasing a laser collimator from Kendrick for my C14.
The reasoning is that I rarely have steady enough skies to allow me to perform a proper collimation on stars.
Does the laser collimator really work???
Thanks,
francois

Francois,

I've tried the Kendrick laser many times on a number of scopes and find it frustrating and ultimately, not very accurate. I personally find hanging eyepiece from the rear while you point the laser and hanging laser from the rear while you look through the eyepiece to be a source of error and frustration. I always ended up using the star test to improve collimation.

Now if you can star test your scope and collimate it really well and then insert the Kendrick collimator and mark where the beam returns, you have a decent way to see if the scope is roughly collimated properly, but still you may find that collimating to that spot may not give you good repeatable collimation results.

I believe a better investment might be to buy or make an artificial star.

Best wishes,

Randy

You can make your own artificial star for a few dollars. Here is a pictorial of how to do it. It works great on an SCT.
The lasers are a pain and as stated before, not very accurate for an SCT.

Attached Image:

There was an excellent description of using Jupiter as a light source for collimation on this forum about two years ago. Search the forum archives.