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!
https://saimons-astronomy.webador.com/software/collimation-circles
- 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
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
- libcamera-vid for detecting Raspberry Pi Cameras. It should already be installed on Raspberry Pi OS by default.
- instalation instructions https://libcamera.org/getting-started.html
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.
- Open terminal application and enter this command:
cd /Applications - Download latest version from GitHub releases page https://github.com/sajmons/CollimationCircles/releases
- 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 - When the download finishes, you should see the new ZIP file
- Double click on it. Archiver utility will extract it for you and you should see CollimationCircles application
- Now run this command to make it executable:
chmod +x CollimationCircles.app/Contents/MacOS/* - Finally run this command or double click CollimationCircles app:
open CollimationCircles.app
- Download latest version from GitHub releases page: https://github.com/sajmons/CollimationCircles/releases
- Extract downloaded ZIP file
- Run this command in your terminal window:
chmod +x CollimationCircles - Run application by double click on it or run this command:
./CollimationCircles
Read my articles here:
- https://saimons-astronomy.webador.com/software/collimation-circles
- https://saimons-astronomy.webador.com/1191504_eaa-telescope-collimation-with-collimation-circles-application
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.
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
To use this application, you must first install .NET Framework on your computer.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/windows?tabs=net70
winget install Microsoft.DotNet.SDK.7
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
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
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
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/macos
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.