First Light with new SW 200PDS

[powerlord]

Took out of box and collimation showed I could only see 1/2 the primary... so not good.

Was late and wanted to get it out for first light, so did a very quick collimation which is far from perfect, but good enough for a go.

Here's the first results - tadpoles in SHO.

Looking at the stars I'm not too far off i don't think.

[bottletopburly]

Excellent did you use a cc , I’ve been fettling mine for a while , so added a Steeltrack focuser, autofocus unit , aperture mask and a third Ota ring , longer ota  ring support bar , secondary dew heater just need a decent night , initial tests looking promising .

[powerlord]

Actually looking at processing above, I think the moral is to not process yer AP stuff when your boiler company is screwing you around and cancelling installs while still got 2k of my money..

the actual raw subs are very nice, and I'm sure I can do better than that.

anyhoo - yes baader mk3 cc. zwo eaf. I use asiair. asi533. I have a top aluminium bar I made and bolt across OTA rings. I use a dew heater on guidescope (old SW 50mm finder with 3d printed mod to fit asi120mm mini), and a dew heater wrapped around ext between asi533 and CC (I find it stops any condensation forming on the filters).

I've just also fitted a fan on the base as I did that on my 300PDS, as it totally stopped dew forming on the primary for the monster - last night I had dew on there from midnight or so, which wasted my second target. this should stop that.

I basically mount a standard pc fan pushing air out (i.e. sucking through ota) onto a bit of correx with a hole cut in it, and tape that to bottom of OTA. plug in to asiair where I can control power, but will just run at 12v (100%) tonight.

tonight plan is either IC342 or the triplets. or both. So just uvir filter.

I also recollimated it properly.

But yeh, happy with it - no issues really other than the focuser tube is a wee bit off centre when I collimated with my Ocal. I suppose I could loosen it off and see if I can fix that but for now I've left it.