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) and Raspberry PI OS Bullseye. I'm not able to test it on macOS, but it should work.

Please be gentle. This app is still in beta stage, but It's suitable to be exposed to wider audience. Feel free to report any issues. Suggestions and contributions are welcome!

• support multiple helper shapes (circle, spider, screw, clip)
• 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
• support for profile saving and loading (JSON files)
• precise position control with keyboard
• multiple platform support (Windows, Linux, macOS)

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/macos

Here are binary files for Windows avaliable for you to download. https://github.com/sajmons/CollimationCircles/releases/

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

If main window is not transparent, when you run application, try runing it like this from terminal window:

dotnet .\CollimationCircles.dll

After installing .NET Framework you type following terminal commands:

sudo apt-get install git

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

cd ColiminationCircles/ColiminationCircles

dotnet run

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

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!

It seams that moving window arround on Linux behaves differently zhan on Windoes. I'll try to fix that in the future. It seams that it's avaloniaUI bug, you can see opened issue here: AvaloniaUI/Avalonia#9972