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Collimation Circles

This program was inspired by Mire De Collimation program written by Gilbert Grillot and Al's Collimation Aid. I combined best features of both and addes some of my own. Purpose of this program is not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to learn new technologies, become better at colimating my telescope and to learn something new.

Main purpose of this program is to help you with aligning optical elements of your telescope such as secondary mirror, primary mirror, focuser, etc.

Collimation Circles is developed with .NET 7 and AvaloniaUI Framework using MVVM architecture patern. Program was tested on Windows 10 and 11, Ununtu Linux 22.04.1 LTS (Wayland), Raspberry PI OS Bullseye and Bookworm. I'm not able to test it on macOS (only in virtual machine), but it should work.

Feel free to report any issues. Suggestions and contributions are welcome!

Home page

https://saimons-astronomy.webador.com/software/collimation-circles

Features

  • support multiple helper shapes (circle, spider, screw, clip, bahtimov mask)
  • user interface for managing list of shapes
  • scaling up or down of whole setup
  • rotation of whole setup
  • transparent background
  • fully customizable shapes: radius, thickness, color, spacing, rotation, label, inclination
  • support for profile saving and loading (JSON files)
  • precise position control with keyboard
  • multiple platform support (Windows, Linux, macOS)
  • multilanguage (English, Slovenian, German)
  • always on top option
  • up to date online help available
  • 3.x and newer camera video stream support to display video from your telescope in background

Dependancies

Colimation circles depends on some external software for handling video streams.

  • VLC for playing video streams.
sudo apt-get install -y libvlc-dev
  • v4l-utils for detecting UVC cameras and their capabilities.
sudo apt-get install -y v4l-utils

Prebuild binaries

Here are prebuild binary files avaliable for you to download (win-x64, linux-x64, linux-arm64 and macos-x64). https://github.com/sajmons/CollimationCircles/releases/

Download latest release as ZIP file, extract it and run executable.

Instalation on MacOS

  1. Open terminal application and enter this command: cd /Applications
  2. Download latest version from GitHub releases page https://github.com/sajmons/CollimationCircles/releases
  3. Type these command in your MacOS terminal application: curl -LO <url address from github releases page> For example: curl -LO https://github.com/sajmons/CollimationCircles/releases/download/version-3.1.0/4-CollimationCircles-3.1.0-osx-x64.zip
  4. When the download finishes, you should see the new ZIP file
  5. Double click on it. Archiver utility will extract it for you and you should see CollimationCircles application
  6. Now run this command to make it executable: chmod +x CollimationCircles.app/Contents/MacOS/*
  7. Finally run this command or double click CollimationCircles app: open CollimationCircles.app

Instalation on Linux

  1. Download latest version from GitHub releases page: https://github.com/sajmons/CollimationCircles/releases
  2. Extract downloaded ZIP file
  3. Run this command in your terminal window: chmod +x CollimationCircles
  4. Run application by double click on it or run this command: ./CollimationCircles

How to use

Read my articles here:

Known issues

Window transparency issues on Raspberry PI OS Bullseye

Unfortunately on some Linux distros main window is not transparent :(. I have succesfully tested it on Ubuntu that's using Wayland window manager. On Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye window transparency doesn't work out of the box. But luckily there is workaround for that.

Open terminal and type this:

raspi-config

go to advanced settings and enable Compositor. Then run this command:

xcompmgr

and then run the CollimationCircles program again. Main Window should now be transparent!

Latest version of Raspberry PI OS Bookworm uses newer Wayland window manager and transparency works as it should.

Running from GitHub source code (works on all platforms)

After installing .NET Framework you type following terminal commands:

sudo apt-get install git

git clone https://github.com/sajmons/CollimationCircles.git

cd CollimationCircles/CollimationCircles

dotnet run

Building and publishing

Prerequisites for building

To use this application, you must first install .NET Framework on your computer.

.NET Framework Instalation

Windows 10 and above

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/windows?tabs=net70

winget install Microsoft.DotNet.SDK.7

Ubuntu 22.04 and above

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-ubuntu-2204

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y dotnet-sdk-7.0

Raspbian OS Bullseye x64

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-debian

wget https://packages.microsoft.com/config/debian/11/packages-microsoft-prod.deb -O packages-microsoft-prod.deb

sudo dpkg -i packages-microsoft-prod.deb

rm packages-microsoft-prod.deb

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y dotnet-sdk-7.0

Raspbian OS Bullseye ARM

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-debian

wget https://dot.net/v1/dotnet-install.sh -O dotnet-install.sh

sudo chmod +x ./dotnet-install.sh

sudo ./dotnet-install.sh --channel 7.0 --install-dir /opt/dotnet/

echo 'export DOTNET_ROOT=/opt/dotnet/' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$DOTNET_ROOT:$DOTNET_ROOT/tools' >> ~/.bashrc

sudo reboot

dotnet --info

macOS

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/macos

Build and publish on Windows

On windows I'm using these commands to make prebuild binaries.

dotnet restore .\CollimationCircles.sln -r win-x64

dotnet publish -c Release -f net7.0 -r win-x64 -o D:\Projects\Publish\CC\win-64 --self-contained true /p:PublishSingleFile=true /p:PublishReadyToRun=true

For more on building see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/dotnet-publish.