Hi people,
Since some time I have been using the Skywave Collimator program to collimate my RC telescope. To streamline the workflow of that collimation process, I have written a small tool for use with SGP. In particular it can do in a simple click what Peter Cox has proposed in his Youtube tutorial (with NINA), my tool will even stack all the defocused images directly so that it can be readily imported into Skywave Collimator.
While the tool is really written with Skywave Collimator in mind, so maybe a niche application, it should also help people with their collimation of a reflector in general I think, when people want to go to INTRA and EXTRA focus easily, and send the scope to the corners and back for assessing the scope alignment over the sensor.
The tool can be downloaded here: SGP Collimation Aid download | SourceForge.net
Cheers, Mikael
Some screenshots to get the idea:
4 Likes
This looks very interesting and I would love to try it out.
Unfortunately when I go to download I get a “Virus Detected” message for the download, and the browser doesn’t save the file. I have tried downloading with both Chrome and Edge.
Oh, that is not good. I have temporarily removed the zip file from SourceForge, the time for me to run some detailed virus scans on my computers. I submitted the files to https://virusscan.jotti.org/, which uses 14 different virus/malware scanners, of which some very famous ones like Kaspersky, Bitdefender and avast, and only 1 out of 14 scanners defected something. But there looks to be something there.
For those who did download the files, please run Microsoft Defender on your computer, it looks like it is among the virus scanners detecting this.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
Mikael
That looks great!
As an aside, what is your opinion on the Skywave tools?
I am on the edge, but it’s a significant investment and I wonder if it’s worth ot for a Newtonian (vs hardware solutions).
If you use the limited model, do you end up spending a lot for day to day collimation?
For no reason Microsoft Defender started falsely identifying my program as malware, this is apparently not uncommon (a complete 3 hour anti virus scan on my PC came back without issues). I just re-compiled the project, and that appears to be enough to stop Defender identifying it as false positive.
Now it successfully passes all 63 virus scanners at VirusTotal:
The new zip is uploaded on SourceForge, please try to download Geoffrey.
I have an RC8 and this is the only tool that will collimate mine both on axis (coma free) and off-axis (balanced astigmatism) consistently. My RC has its mechanical centre off from the optical centre, so my doughnut is not symmetric when collimation is good, which was extremely frustrating when using mechanical tools for collimation.
But, I find Skywave Collimator quite slow, at least on my NUC. So one needs to be patient. I have a permanent setup, so I only need to collimate every 6 months or so (difference between summer and winter, basically). So I am fine spending 1 hour collimating. If you need to use it often, I would make sure that the PC connected to the Skywave licence is a powerful one.
I have no experience with Newtonians, so cant help there!
Mikael
Thanks a lot for the advice!
