Collimating a Ritchey Chrétien Telescope
A deep dive into collimation techniques, the principles of which apply, in part, to many other catadioptric and reflecting optics.
After publishing the first edition, I purchased a new 10-inch Ritchey Chrétien telescope (RCT), to image smaller galaxies and planetary nebula. The price of RCTs has plummeted over recent years and is an increasingly popular choice for imagers. My assortment of refractors all arrived with perfectly aligned optics. In contrast, the delivered condition of an RCT (or SCT) is seldom perfect and aligning the two mirrors, or collimation, is not a trivial task and carries some risk. If you are not entirely comfortable taking a wrench and screwdriver to your scope then it ...
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