Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

Tuesday evening around 20:00 local I opened up the observatory with the intent to do an optical collimation and some imaging of Saturn and Jupiter. It was hazy, The near full waning moon was up and wiping out most constellations and actually also had a glowing halo around it. Not good.
My method of collimating is to use the same optical setup as when I am imaging, ie a 90deg diagonal, a x2 barlow and the imaging camera.
I picked a bright start overhead, Vega in this case, run the focus out, check the symmetry, run it back through the middle of focus and back out the other side and check symmetry again.
If it looks symmetrical, it is collimated. If it does not, then it is not.
I looked, ran through it several times, and I could not make the judgement call about yes or no.
I include three images below, you take a guess.

After that I went ahead and did a series of runs on Saturn (almost due south and at highest altitude) and then Jupiter, shutting down before 21:00 local

This was the best of Saturn, best 2% of approx 4K frames,
and the best of Jupiter that night, the best 25% of approx 10K frames.

Both planetary images are disappointing.
Later on it was mentioned that it was probably never a good idea to try and collimate on a night of bad seeing or transparency. Will have to try again under better conditions!

This is the first image of Jupiter since the 2022 opposition (4 days past opposition).
Altitude was at max , seeing and transparency were average, but the focus still was not sharp. Think maybe it is time for another collimation test.
The moon callisto is just visible to the upper left and Io to the center right.

And this is from the same day as last but in the evening observing session… first time in ages that there was a morning and an evening session!

Too bad that seeing and transparency were poor. This is the best of of 12 runs of 180 seconds.. not nearly as good as the past few days.
Altitude was only 25 degrees and this was the best 25% of 4000 frames.
The Cassini division is barely visible and only about 5 cloud bands can be seen in the northern hemisphere.

From the morning of Friday 2022 Sept 02 after doing some runs of imaging Saturn.
As it turns out, this 4 or 5th imaging session, the exposure started to drop and it has turned out NOT to be bad transparency over Lake Ontario but rather the secondary mirror dewing up.
This was good to know. During the day we added a 25″ dew heating strap to the outside of the OTA near the primary mirror. This will help keep it from dewing up and hopefully some heat on the interior will waft up the OTA and help keep the secondary from dewing up later tonight.
The Great Red Spot had just past center and was heading off the field of view. 36 runs in total were completed, most under mirror dewup conditions.
After cleaning the optics, there were still some dust motes that came along.

Tests were completed with the best 10%, 25% and 40% and the best 10% were used for these images.