1.6 inch flattener?

[philhilo]

So to closure. Had a 30 minute clear sky/availability slot tonight, and threw everything into checking the new scope/flattener/focus issue - family/work/life permitting.

Standing staring at the darkening sky straining until I could make out polaris - pa. Next - capella - 1 star align and get an eyepiece in there and it was looking sharp so the OTA is OK. Quickly switch the flattener and camera in - gutted no focus, aha, haven't taken the nosepiece off the flattener. Fumble fumble, tough to dismantle as several adapters are very thin or hidden and I screwed the whole thing down hard to take the flex out. Surrounded by expensive bits of kit perched on slopey wet plastic as I wrestle the next bit off. At last nosepiece out and reassemble. Argh, mount swivels whilst screwing the whole assembly back on to the drawtube. Quick realign to Capella and manual focus as no Bhatinov for this yet - it looks OK on the camera at x10. Fingers crossed. Then hook up the laptop to mount and camera, and GOTO M31 (I know should have stayed with Capella to check focus further), and a quick 30 second image whilst looking at watch counting down the minutes, and...….its looking OK, the focus seems OK, at last after weeks of faff and many £££ it looks OK without getting up close, hooray!

After that a series of high ISO images to try and get decent centring before realising that the lack of balancing was killing the tracking (I normally massively overload the mount with a 200mm reflector and DSLR and guidescope and telrad but have it nicely balanced and it guides just fine, so figured it cant be that bad with this little thing, wrong!) and I was out of time - and the fog rolled in 5 hours earlier than forecast. I had hoped to put up a nice image of M31, however, below is the single unguided 30sec frame of M31 that the little WO 66SD finally delivered, and I think it is OK considering the tracking was all over the place, (ignore the colour, haven't yet sorted processing images from the modded camera).

As my son said,

"Dad, why do you choose to do things that are so hard?"

Thanks all, merry Christmas, and clear skies!