[Atomicat]

Hey there. Beginner looking to jump in with both feet and obviously by the title of this post you can see I've got a Meade ETX-90 and some trouble getting fine focus on it. I inherited this scope from my dad who bought it some 20 years ago and being the dumb arse that he is, never learned to do a thing with it. There goes my college tuition eh! Anyways, I'm a nature photographer and heavy-duty science buff so I'd really like to get the sharpest pictures I can with this. It's been sitting on the shelf for 20 years though and I figure it needs some tuning. I've read the manual and haven't found anything about fine-tuning the focus. Here are some pictures I've taken that should be enough for anyone in the know to tell me what's up and what I've got to do to fix this.

First off here's an example picture of a beach showing how off focus it is. This is a 1:1 strip at a distance of about oh, fifty feet or so.

This is a picture, focused, of the point sources in the following pictures. Sunlight on rippling water.

This is the same picture with focus slightly off...

And this is the same again, more off focus.

So, what's up! I'd dearly love to get the sharp pictures I've seen others crank out. Looking forwards to getting the best out of this nice toy. Thanks in advance.

Atomicat