collimated Manuel's C8

Headed over to Manuel's after dinner. The plan was to check and correct the collimation of his Celestron 8" Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope. I wanted to do it with a false star... So we could avoid issues with set-up time and sky conditions.

We set up the OTA in his living room. We installed a high power eyepiece directly in the back of the telescope. Popped off the secondary mirror cover. Phillips. Manuel fetched a small driver. The spherical reflector (a blue 1" glass ball Christmas tree decoration) I set up in the den beside the kitchen. It was about 35 feet away. Aimed a single bulb white LED light at the sphere. Dimmed the lights. Racked in to get focus. Had to move the 'scope and ball further apart a little and fiddle with the eyepiece to get perfect focus.

Showed Manuel the non-concentric patterns at in-focus and out-focus. I did the roughly collimation. Then I focused perfectly. Showed him the diffraction rings. I think he say them. Still out a bit. Tuned the secondary a little bit more. Perfect!

I reminded him that we needed to double check this under good skies.

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While I wasn't getting him to look through the 'scope, Manuel started processing the Jupiter files from the night before. There were a few snags but then he got things going. He wanted to show me what he was doing. He showed me the simple, fast process he used. He let the software automatically select the best frames. The quick results were not bad.