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Orion Short Tube 80 Test

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11/16/2025 - One cloud free and moon free night before clouds & rain set in... had cleaned the venerable Meade LX10 8" SCT OTA, corrector, primary and secondary mirror (after a very dark disturbance arrived for two evenings' collection)...and awaiting replacing the steel screws with stainless...so brought up the Orion ST-80 for testing. Worked to attach the Xagyl filter wheel and Svbony Sv405cc camera. Noted the correct back focus for the Hotech SCA flattener is 55mm with 6.5mm between the Sv405cc chip and housing...leaving 48.5mm of back focus distance to work with. Used extension tubes to get as close as practical... and mounted the ST-80 on the CGEM DX with the Cosmicar 25mm F1.8 CCTV lens set up for guiding using the Zwo ASI120-MC.  Focused manually successfully (tested within the focus tab within Ekos).   After focusing, found that the Hotech SCA back focus is not perfect...with coma visible on the extreme edges...extending for nearly 1/5 of the size of the frame...
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NGC 6960 / NGC 6992 / NGC 1499 / M 33

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08/30/2025 - No clouds...some moon early.  Set up the Ekos scheduler for NGC 6960 with dual narrow band filter in place with M 33 scheduled for near the end of the evening (0400) when there's no moon (using the UV / IR filter only). Utilizing the venerable Meade LX10 SCT with the Starizona SCT Corrector III, Svbony SV405cc cooled camera, the Xagyl 1.25" 8-slot filter wheel, the Meade zero-shift focuser on the Celestron CGEM DX mount.  Guiding through the 5x90 RACI guide scope using the Zwo ASI120MC-S camera with built-in ST-4 guide port cable running to the mount .  Double checked polar alignment and tested the internal guider in Ekos and set Ekos up to to use this instead of phd2 (which has a habit of dropping the Indi guide camera...thus ending the imaging session prematurely). In the morning noted 100x NGC 6960 light frames had been collected. Only a few M 33 frames were collected until Ekos shut down the system due to the end of astronomic night time.   Exam...
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