Dirty mirror?

[mulcheater]

I've been working with a pre owned Kvant Cm1800 and notice a sort of light cloud form when I emit single beams. I cleaned the external window, but I think it may be something internal.. I attached an image below.

i have also noticed that the beam seems to curve when I project a vertical line on the right side of the image.. I couldn't capture an image of that though.

My questions for the forum are, can I correct the cloudy beam by cleaning the mirrors in the projector, and how can I align a warped line. Thanks!

[VDX]

... could be damaged AR-coating on the internal or external optics ...

[buffo]

You could try opening the case and cleaning the scanner mirrors and the dichros, but you need to be very careful, as it's easy to damage the coatings on the dichros, and it's also easy to knock the alignment out of adjustment. While you're in there, go ahead and clean the inside surface of the aperture window too.

If that doesn't get rid of the problem, you might want to try installing a spatial filter right in front of the scanners to try to remove the worst of the halo around the beam. Even a simple pinhole would probably help at least a little bit, but ideally you'd want a pinhole installed near the center focal point of a 1:1 Keplerian Collimator.

Adam