[Hagar (Doug)]

I received my new RC10 last week and finally got a little bit of sky to take a look at. (That has now gone.

My first thoughts on the scope:

Again like the 8" it is built to a price. I spent the extra dollars and bought the carbon fibre tube version and like the 8" the carbon fibre serves no purpose other than to make it look good. It comes with a top and bottom losmandy plate which are securely fixed to the main mirror cell at one end and to the cast aluminium ring which supports the secondary mirror at the other end. With this tupe of fixing you could never ever call the carbon ring a zero expansion joint.
Like the 8" the focuser is pure rubbish. Yes it's bigger at 3" and stronger with much heavier material in it's manufacture but the support for the focuser draw tube is exactly the same as the 8" version in all aspects.
One big improvement is the addition of a center spot on the secondary mirror making collimation so much easier.

It does look good and initial trial image shows real promise but I will have to do some work on my mount to get the OVision worm working at it's best as at 2.0m focal length guiding errors are very noticable. It is a big scope and I mean very big and quite heavy to go with it's size.

I have ordered a new focal reducer which has yet to be tested and a nice new 3" feather touch focuser which should make this scope sing.
The initial starfield image shows real promise considering I had the Tak Field flattener just shoved in the imaging train at a distance way shorter than the desired distance.

Overall I think this should prove to be a very nice scope but should you be thinking of one as an imaging scope be prepared to add an extra $900au for a 3" FT focuser and somewhere around the $600Au mark for a field flattener and unless you want a nice black scope just buy the Aluminium version at $1000 less then add the extras.

Maybe I will get some sky to look at after the focuser and FF arrive or am I being hopefull.