Mini-review of Glatter Parallizer

As a planet imager I am obsessed with accurate collimation. One of the many sources of error lies in the lose fit between a 1.25" adapter and the 2" focuser, and lose fit between the 1.25" collimator and the adapter. In the past I would solve this by shimming the adapter (with tape) and the barrel of my laser collimator, making the fit so tight that I had to put the shimmed 1.25" adapter in the freezer to be able to insert it in the 2" focuser tube! That also meant I could not remove the adapter in the field.

My recently aquired Glatter Parallizer has solved my problems. While I have not done any extensive testing, I can tell that it gives me about the same accuracy as I could achieve with my best shimming efforts. What remains of wobble is probably inherent in the focuser and laser collimator. The design is remarkably simple, just an angled setscrew and outer surface that isn't quite round. The "manual" is equally short; just one sentence!

Recent images

Just a couple of my better Mars images, and a Saturn...

 

New camera problem

My new DBK618 camera has a problem with gridlines at 60 fps. I posted about this over in the Imaging Source forum a couple of weeks ago, and they are (still) looking into the problem. One of the big selling points of this camera is its (supposed) 60 fps capability without artefacts. The model it surpasses, the DBK21, was also supposed to support 60 fps, but eventually it turned out that it produced a "ring"-artefact at this frame rate. It is therefore disappointing that once again this new model does not function properly at 60 fps. It is also surprising that nobody else have reported this problem before, as the camera has been on the market for more than 6 months. After I reported my problem at the forum, a couple of other owners of the camera have reported the same problem. Nevertheless, the results so far (at 30 fps) seem to be significantly better than my old DBK21. 

Below is Mars from a 60 fps capture (sharpened and resized by 2X). It does not matter which DeBayer method I use, the gridlines are always there. Multipoint alignment will partially solve/mask the problem, probably because different parts of the planet are moved around a little relative to each other, and blended in a way that hides seams and averages out some of the gridlines. Still, it is not a good solution.