[Peter Ward]

My STT8300 pro plus pack arrived Friday, which came with Self guiding 8 position filter wheel, and full set of LRGB plus narrow band filters.

The guider being ahead of the filter train made it extremely easy to find guide stars with absolutely no filter attenuation worries.

To be fair, there we some teething issues with such a new camera, thankfully these were quickly solved with a firmware update. Also, the pick-off prism, unlike the earlier coplanar dual CCD version, does suffer from a little vignetting. Guider Focus and position threads were a too coarse in pitch for my liking, but after just a little fiddling, the system could be locked down with the twist of a single knob to provide tight and bright guide stars time and again.

Once set and calibrated, stars consistently turned out as perfect points with no elongated or eggy distortions. The delta-t of the camera was also brilliant. -35c CCD set point had the peltier power just cruising at a mere 35%. the Kodak KAF8300 sensor had remarkably low noise at that temperature, however with suitable dark frame calibration the system became effectively noise free.

CCD read-up time was blisteringly fast. Full-res frames in a second. Sub-frame focus was almost real time, making focus very easy.

Unfortunately I only had a short time to play with the camera prior to work commitments...so no test images just yet! hopefully the weather will cooperate next week to enable posting of some results.