Wow, another clear(ish) night forecast.  I took the opportunity this evening to give the scope collimation a tweak, but I found that the seeing wasn’t great at all, with some high level moisture causing a few problems.

I used the nearby Red Giant α Tauri (Alderbaran) to carry out thefinal collimation tweak.  I used, for the first time, the defocused star real-time collimation routine in CCD Inspector to aid with the routine, though a little cumbersome with the DMK camera, I reached a point of “perfect” collimation after about 30 mins of effort.

buoyed with this success, I used the Bahtinov Grabber routine developed by Niels Noordhoek (Can be found here) to assist in precise focusing.  Once again, I found this a little more difficult using the DMK probably down the sensitivity, but the software reported the Bahtinov shape in the critical focus zone.

Imaged using an IS DMK camera through a Meade 12″ LX200R at native f10.  Stacked using AVIStack2, the image is 350 from 2000 frams taken at 30fps.  A little blurry still, but I think this was down to atmospherics rather than collimation this time.

Thanks for looking

Steve