Daylight Focusing

June 12, 2021

Doing some daylight focus testing with the 8" Newtonian and the ZWO ASI071 camera + Ha filter to cut down on the light. Focusing on that tree line about half a mile away.

I'm still waiting for the final piece of the Newtonian reflector puzzle, a coma corrector. This scope is fairly fast at f/4, and so the coma introduced by the parabolic primary mirror needs some correcting. Without the corrector the star field in images from a large sensor camera will bend away from the center--"coma".

In the meantime, I'm out on the deck today testing focuser position with an old William Optics field flattener/reducer, which brings the scope to 640mm focal length at f/3.2. And it doesn't look too bad. That tree line is about half a mile (~.75 km) away. It's so bright out and this astro camera is so light-sensitive that I'm shooting frames at .001 seconds with a long-pass hydrogen-alpha filter, which is only letting light in from 640nm out to about 800nm, so most of the visual spectrum is cut, and what's left is this range of near infra-red.