The very first thing I noticed after the first night imaging with my CB245 was how badly I had centered the CCD and the cold finger. Objects I wanted to image were not only completely out of the FOV of my illuminated 9mm reticle, but also almost out of the FOV on my 26mm Plössl! Finding my targets was just a ludicrous waste of time.
After asking around on the CCD list and realizing that nobody had any tips on an easy way to do this, I decided to start rubbing my 2 remaining neurons together to see if I could maybe get a spark.
The idea I came up with was pretty simple. If I could get the CCD to see a perfectly centered crosshair I could then move it into the right spot. Great! Easy!?
I pulled off the top of the camera head and traced a circle around it. I found and marked center with a compass, and then drew a crosshair through it. Then, I placed the camera head cap on top of the crosshair drawn on paper and made sure the cap was centered in relation to the surrounding circle.
Now for the hard part: Getting into my mom’s sewing stuff. After a few mumbles and threats I managed to grab a spool of the thicker type white thread that I taped into place in line with the crosshairs.
In the first image you can see the cap with the threads and in the next one everything mounted and ready to go on the scope for testing. I made an aperture mask out of cardboard with about a dime sized hole in it. Fired up Win245 and played with find mode until I could see something.
In the first image below, you can see the best I could do to center the chip by eye. The next one is after only about 2 or 3 tweaks of the position of the cold finger. The last image is of the top of a lamp post about 15 meters away. The tip of the light post centered in the Meade 9mm illuminated reticule eyepiece, and then switched it for the CB245 and got that image. Good enough! Quick and dirty centering of your CCD in 15 mins or your money back. Now if it would only stop raining… ;o)
