Test tools

With a professional background in calibrations of hydrographic and geodetic equipment I like to learn as much as possible about the calibration and testing options in astronomy. Apart from the usual tools like Cheshire and concentric eyepieces, collimation laser, etc., I have constructed a Foucault test apparatus and a Bath-interferometer. The latter was done with help of the Almere public observatory. Both tools were used to test two of the Newton-telescopes in the observatory.

In order to test collimation at a higher level I created a collimator using SkyWatcher Explorer 300PDS.

Later on I added a single-pass photographic Ronchi and finally a DPAC (Double Pass Auto-Collimation) set-up to do on-axis Ronchi-, Foucault- and star-tests.