How sensitive is a Series 4 tube lens to decentering?

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clengman
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Joined: Mon Jan 29, 2018 2:22 pm

How sensitive is a Series 4 tube lens to decentering?

#1 Post by clengman » Thu Mar 08, 2018 3:01 pm

So I was working on cleaning dust from my AO Series 4. I cleaned the top and bottom surfaces of the correcting lens above the objective turret and then saw some dust on an interior surface of one of these lens elements. I disassembled this correcting lens as carefully as I could, removed the dust and reassembled. I'm noticing now that there aberrations on the periphery of the field of view in the lower lefthand corner. It's not a huge problem, it's pretty far out to the edge, but it seems to me like a decentering problem since it's really just in one region of the field. I have gathered from reading that objectives are very sensitive to slight misalignments of the optical elements within and that it's only for professional opticians with professional tools to disassemble and reassemble them, but that eyepieces are not as sensitive to slight misalignments and that it's generally okay to disassemble them for cleaning. Just wondering where on this spectrum this correcting lens falls. Did I do a really bad thing by opening it up?

I'm also not certain that this aberration was not there before I fiddled with the correcting lens. It very well may have been and I just hadn't noticed it. It's pretty far out to the edge where I don't expect the image to be very good anyway.

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