So the sun's out and if the sun's out that means it's beach weather and if it's beach weather that means it's astronomy weather and more than that tonight is the night of Saturn's opposition so I'm gonna go put my 9 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 so I stront OTA back on and I'm gonna show you guys how to columnate because the first thing I do before any planetary session is columnate. Planetary in particular you're at very high focal lengths so the more you're zoomed in or magnified on the on the target the more any kind of aberration with the mirrors or misalignment is going to show up as Paul Fogas. My bird is going crazy. I'm sorry there. But anyway I just wanted to show you here it's been here at the front of the OTA you'll notice that you normally have the three columnation screws here. Of course this is the faster capable mirror that you can pull out so you can put your hyper star on if you need to but I've taken off those screws and I've replaced them with a product called Bob's Nobs and our Bob's Nobs is a method where you can tweak these columnation screws easily without having to get a screwdriver out or anything like that and that's really helpful when you're there in the dark trying to fiddle with all of this stuff. Finding screw holes is difficult. However it should be noted that these are much looser than having the columnation screws themselves so if you do go for Bob's Nobs you want to make sure that you columnate more often than you would if you just had the screws. Okay I'm gonna go outside and set this up and finally enjoy some astronomy weather. My name is Dilleno Donald and you're watching Star Stuff. This video on columnation is sponsored by Highpoint Scientific so big thanks to Highpoint Scientific for their support. They offer free technical support for their customers, lifetime support on the products they sell and they have a price match guarantee and I do mention Bob's Nobs in this video and they sell a whole range of Bob's Nobs there as well so be sure to check out Highpoint Scientific. So a little tip here if you've got some sort of backyard observatory like me is you need a moisture absorber you need something to absorb all of our humidity I'm using this damp rid stuff. We've had a lot of rain lately that you can see that because of that sun's out today and all of this is wet and that can really damage your electronics that condensation. Well I think I'm all set up and ready to go. As you saw before I did fiddle with the columnation screws the Bob's Nobs columnation screws so technically this scope is out of columnation which is a stupid thing to do and I hate doing that as I was doing it but I did it because I wanted to do it for you. You know it's true everything I do I do it for you. fingers crossed and we're back in the observatory and it's nighttime. Was that transition cool? So I've got my camera on and I've aligned to Alpha Centur which is a really bright star you want to be doing with this with a bright star if you can. I don't like collimating with a focal reduce type of a magnetifier so I've got the two and a half times power mate really long focal length I'm zoomed right in because that will make any adjustments I make with the axiom. Okay you can see I've got Alpha Centur real on the screen there you can see there's a little bit out of the columnation there. Now we can see the screws and you can see the star on screen and the trick is know which screw we need to adjust for that one side so a trick you can do is put your hand over one screw or towards one screw and you can see an area on the screen that changes and that's the thicker side so now I'll try this screw here and that's also the thicker side so I'll try this final screw from this direction and that's the thin side and that's the side we want to adjust the thin side so find identify which screw is on that thin side of the of the airy disc and that's the one we want to adjust. You know you notice as we adjust this the star is going to move on screen and this is the trick here it's a matter of chasing it make an adjustment set it back to the middle again and try again. Now here's another little tip that helps me when I'm chasing the star around. You notice we hit the down arrow the star is going up we hit left or right goes the opposite direction so what I like to do is just flip the hand control if you need to depending on which side of the screen you're on so that the arrows correspond to the directions that you're pressing so that's a lot more intuitive and you don't have to think in your head you can try and reverse engineer what's going on on screen so now it's just the matter of me making these changes to the collommation screw or the knob the Bob's knob and then chasing the star around the middle make an adjustment with the star on the middle and keep going so I'm going to start making these adjustments to that screw on the thin end and you'll watch it on the screen as I chase and that's looking pretty good now getting a nice even disc so I'll try and it's probably not perfectly right yet so I'll just keep it out of focus and try that adjustment a little bit more okay I think that's looking pretty good another little thing you might have noticed as I did this was if I put my hand in front of the OTA can you see all the air can you see my emissions there's my hand in front of the mirror can you see all the heat just radiating off my hand that's called Schlieren imaging that's how you can set up properly indoors and see the cool effects that come off matches and other objects but I think it's really cool to see the heat radiating off your hand and that's a good reason why temperature fluctuations near the telescope are bad news for your imaging anyway that's just a side point to this now it's all collimated so now I just have to focus up and we're good to go now while I'm here I may as well put on the baton on mask now I've got that middle beam going across right in the center of the two diagonal beams so that's looking pretty good and I would say now I'm ready to image satin and there she is ready to go now I've got my motorised filter wheel set up here so I can do an auto run and just start that run and it will automatically change the filter and start recording while I'm getting data so you know what that means it's time for beer not sponsored this is just my local brewery a local drop and I just have a problem well it's the cold hard light of day I'm up the effects of the alcohol I've worn off I posted the image last night and it was well received when you see the image note that there is the ceiling effect which is the shine of the rings is brighter for these few days during opposition I don't know how it works but the light bounces back from the dust and ice in the rings straight back to earth and they do appear vibrant the rings really appear to glow so I'm going to show you how I process that image which is really very simple and straight forward here and that's it I hope you enjoyed this video and the collation remember if you do decide to use Bob's knobs just be careful that you don't break your OTA or your secondary mirror and if you have any doubts about it maybe check in with your vendor and if that vendor is high point scientific the sponsor of this video know that they will support you for buying Bob's knobs from them so thank you high point scientific thank you everyone who tags me in their photos I love seeing your work my name is Dylan O'Donnell remember everything is meaningless and we're all going to die