This is a sad tale
This is a sad tale. Dr. Clay Sherrod that runs Arkansas Skies is a well known legend in the astronomical community and has offered a "supercharge" service for fine tuning telescopes for almost 40 years that I know of. After acquiring a used telescope and using it for a little over a year, I really liked it and decided to send it to him for routine cleaning and some fine tuning. The optics were superlative; I have to regard it as a factory exception, the 1 in a million that is just absolutely perfect. It was so perfect that I was afraid to do anything with the mirror, afraid of letting anyone else touch it, but decided that Dr. Clay was the one person I could trust. After I got it back from the servicing, the mirrors were horribly out of alignment. Not just a bit, like it got jarred in the shipping, I mean totally out of whack. Stars had huge swollen tails like comets. I took it apart and learned how to collimate (align) the mirrors, which took me 4 8 hour nights, working continuously doing what has to be about the most tedious job in the world, trying to fix it. The telescope requires serious disassembly to get to the screws that need adjusting, then you have to put it back together, take it out to the mounting, mount it, check an out-of-focus star again, take it off the mount, bring it in and adjust the screw that you saw viewing the star needs tightening or loosening. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Four nights over 8 hours. After all that work, the image is almost good enough to do the fine planetary work that I do. it will probably take 3-4 more nights of that disassembly/reassembly/guessing how much to turn each screw hell to get it to that point. I have to resign myself to the fact that it will *never* be as good as it was before I sent it to him. He said he tested it out for a day after re-assmblng it from cleaning. HOW? Someone that knows nothing about it could look at a simple image of a single star and say, "That's totally wrong". None of the screws were loose when I started fixing it. The box was not dented. There is no way it could have lost alignment, that badly, simply going through the mails. I am really at a loss to even guess HOW he could mess it all up so badly. And I paid to have my best telescope degraded forever. I didn't have the heart to tell him how badly he screwed up, and it wouldn't do any good anyway, since now I would not let him anywhere near it. Something has gone terribly wrong at Arkansas Skies.