A radical departure for me...

[gorann]

23 hours ago, tomato said:

Thanks for this @Xiga. Interesting that he encountered issues with the focus which required regular refocus, that’s contrary to myself and Gorann’s experience with the RASA.

The flat USB cables supplied with ZWO cameras don’t have a great reputation for reliability, so might be good to change this for a round profile cable.

I have never switched off the circulation fan on the scope when imaging, so I’ll do this next time.

Interesting presentation by Brandon Tackett in that video. As Steve pointed out we have both been surprised how easy it has been to focus the RASA 8 and how well it keeps focus, so maybe there is some QC issues with the focusing mechanism and we have to hope that Olly has baught one without focusing issues. Brandon pointed out that he found the focusing nob very senitive and I have also there the complete opposite experience. I think I have seen that there are micro-focusing nobs that can be fitted to the RASA8 but I never understood why that would be needed.

My initial issues have been with sensor distance but I have that pretty much solved now. I now and then get a bit of elongated stars in the corners but  that can be fixed in processing and with an APS-C sized camera I cannot complain too much. I had a look at Brandon Tackett's images in Astrobin (https://www.astrobin.com/users/Tackettbr/) and he also seem to have some issues with what could be tilt even if he is using a smaller sensor than me. It could possibly also be that his scope is not as well colimated as he thinks. My second RASA 8 was not perfectly collimated from the box and that gave odd star shapes especially in the corners.