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
```
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

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

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

Instalation on Linux

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

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