I still love my RC 8".... however:
Not every photo will be perfect. Not every setup will be smooth... and then there’s this shot, the result of the adage “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. If you have children present or a weak disposition, abandon hope all ye that enter here:
- I set up all my gear on a perfectly level, open netball court.
- I then had to relocate everything because my battery box had mysteriously drained to 11.3V and I was forced to run from a 3-port cigarette adaptor from my car battery.
- I needed to periodically turn on my ignition to stop the warning from my car that my battery wouldn’t be able to start.
- I started a quick collimation to correct a small amount of oblong stars, I dropped the Allen key *in to* my RC. (No damage to mirror, thank The Flying Spaghetti Monster!)
- When I took off my OTA to upend it to retrieve it, I failed to turn off my mount and remove the counterweights so it freaked out.
- When I finally got to “Collimation Round 2: Optical Boogaloo”, I chased it for 45 minutes and ended up back where I started and no better collimation.
- Because of the oblong stars, my HFR refused to drop below 7, I have previously repeatedly got ~3.5, so I know I was badly affected.
- I had recently moved my prism in my off-axis guider to fix a small sensor occlusion, and the resulting focus change meant that I had to change adaptors - which feel in to either category: “too short” or “too long” and I had to use it held on by the very top of the brass securing collar, meaning my guide stars were “oddly shaped” and thus kept getting lost due to SNR changes.
- NINA stubbornly refused to autocomplete the object I was imaging for coordinates and slewed to some random spot in the sky.
Icing on the cake: it was a full moon. I only started imaging at 10:45pm because of the above problems.
Cherry on the top: I had driven 6h from Sydney to Condobolin THAT DAY to find the only clear skies in the state. I ended up with just 64 minutes 8x 120” Lum/R/G/B before pulling the plug due to sheer frustration.