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Having the reflected laser beam showing safely on the grid plane you can finish the collimation
process quickly.
Tilt the main mirror with the help of the adjustment screws until the laser beam passes through the
hole (and is reflected into itself).
That’s it! Your Newtonian is perfectly collimated. A final check of the collimation has to be done
with a star image (see below).
Picture left shows the coma error in a heavily misaligned
Newtonian – highly enlarged and exaggerated.
Picture right shows a star image also highly enlarged after
collimation (highly idealised as well).
Adjusting Schmidt-Cassegrain (SC) telescopes with the new (black body) Laser Colli
TM
Adjusting SC-Optics by means of a laser is not an easy task.
Reason being – other than in an Newtonian optical system – the SC-secondary mirror is shaped
strongly convex thereby dispersing the beam of most common lasers into a blob or otherwise odd-
shaped form, rendering it unusable for defining the actual center of the reflected laser beam.
It takes a careful selection of lasers (we have a reject rate of 35%) and a special technique for
sharpening the outgoing laser beam, in order to perceive a sharply defined round laser signal,
when reflected from an SC-secondary mirror.
Another, most important help in this task are the hundreds of crossmarks, etched into the reference
plate of the Laser-Colli™. They glow much more strongly compared to a simple opaque glass,
making it a lot easier to perceive the center of the reflected laser beam.
Look at the different reflections as produced by a silver colored Newton Laser-Colli™ of the first
generation, compared to the GEN II SC-Laser-Colli™ featuring a black metal body.