Re: 1/6 or 1/8 wave

Many thanks for all the input.

Night before last I centered on Polaris and defocused slightly:
http://members.cox.net/pnixon18/Polaris.JPG. This didn't look good at all,
so yesterday I set up an artificial star and recollimated my scope (results:
http://members.cox.net/pnixon18/collimation7.jpg ). Then last night I again
centered on Polaris and defocused to try for the doughnut method. Seeing was
better than the night before but still not "outstanding". Anyway, I noticed
that the secondary looked centered when the drawtube was inside focus but
was not centered when outside focus. So I tweaked the collimation again
until both patterns looked as identical as I could make them. The results
were very promising!

A slightly defocused Polaris was now a single ring with what appeared to be
4 bright pearls equally spaced rather than that triangle thing.

I then turned the scope to Saturn. Visually it was much improved from when I
had seen it a couple of weeks ago. In a 9.8mm Plossl it looked bright and
pretty sharp - certainly better than I'd seen in a long time. Adding the
barlow made it bigger but did not increase the "wow" factor.

I'm encouraged, enough so that I'm going to align the scope and see if I can
get some pics.




.

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