Finished building my new carbon fibre newt last week with last night presenting a clear night with good seeing ( late dew not so good ) to test the optics.
The scope wouldn’t come to focus due to the TSGPU coma corrector changing the focus plane by around 20mm. I had an old Bintel 2” x 35mm eye piece extender so cut the nose off it , filed it flat and level ( checked with digital calliper) it did the trick , not pretty but effective.
Spider vanes were adjusted to within 0.40mm of each other , again using the digital calliper which has accuracy of 2 decimal points.
Scope was rebalanced, re collimated and set up a new profile for PHD2 ( new dark library, new calibration which I auto restored)
Chose M7 Ptolemy’s Cluster as a test target but had no idea that its background Star field was so bloody dense. The last time I imaged it was with a DSLR about 5 years ago and didn’t have the capability of my current 2600MC , wow what a Star field.
Captured 55 x 30 sec subs
40 x Flats
60 x Bias
Image calibrated out well
PHD2 Multistar guiding was running beautifully at 0.50 to 0.60 arc sec total )
Stacked in DSS
Processed in Startools V1.8 OSC linear data set
Pretty happy for a first light and Star test on this new 8” Carbon fibre Newt , stars in on axis region are round and tight , only some coma evident in the corner areas which I will adjust and re test using some 0.50mm shims hopefully tonight as rain is imminent.
Astrobin link below for more detail and better resolution ……
https://www.astrobin.com/aihe3n/
Original frame version ( 200KB )
Crop version (200KB)
Comments welcome
Thanks
Martin