Collimation Tools
Proper optical collimation is essential to achieving top performance from your telescope. A properly collimated telescope will provide pleasing images over a wide range of magnifications. An improperly collimated telescope may fail to show stars as round points of light, especially towards the edge of field. Refractors and Maksutov-Cassegrain telescopes do not normally require collimation, but most other types of telescopes do. Laser collimators are an almost indispensable tool for Newtonian telescopes; however, they are not particularly useful for Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes.