Telescope Maintenance

Video Transcript

"As with all optical devices, your mirror or your lens will eventually get dirty. Now, for a telescope like this, it's very rare for the mirror, way down in the tube, to get that dirty if you keep the cover on it. And all of them will come with a cover. So, you're really not going to need to polish or to clean your mirror more than once every two or three years. And, it's very tricky in cleaning a mirror. You want to do it so that you don't scratch the surface. Your manual will have some information about cleaning the mirror. But, don't feel like if it gets a little dust on it, you have to clean it immediately. The other thing that you'll need to clean are the eye pieces. This eye piece, for instance, you might have someone gets mascara smudge on it or someone might have accidentally touched it with their finger. Don't just pull your tee shirt out and wipe the eye piece. Any time you have a surface that's precise, precision optical surface, use cotton balls and use a special cleaner. You can make your own cleaner out of distilled water, a little bit of rubbing alcohol, and a small drop of dish soap. And you would make a little solution, just make a gallon of that, and you would roll the cotton ball around with just a damp cotton ball, and then you will, you'll wipe it dry. But, don't touch it with your fingers or a regular cloth. When you're setting up your telescope take care not to set it down on the ground in a way that it really jars it. Now, this telescope will probably stay aligned for a couple of years. You should have to worry a whole lot if you've done an initial alignment on your telescope. But, if you notice on the back end, there's something called a mirror cell, and you see these knobs or these thumb screws. These are how you adjust the optical axis of the telescope. These smaller knobs are for tightening it down and locking it in place, and the others are for adjusting the pitch of that mirror. So, if you've done an initial alignment, and your manual will tell you how to do that, you should lock them, you shouldn't have to, if you don't jar the telescope, you shouldn't have to change that very often."