First Light - Starizona SCT Corrector III
10/13/2024 -- Configuring the venerable Meade LX10 2000mm/F10 SCT with a new 2" visual back and the Starizona SCT Corrector III. Set up spacers to ~1mm of the 83.8mm backfocus needed with the Svbony 405cc camera (based on a total required backfocus of 90.3mm for the SCT Corrector. Skies were very poor with huge moon and clouds... but was anxious for first light to see how this new corrector performed. The mount was nominally polar aligned from previous work (10/12) with the Celestron 10" newtonian attempting to fix collimation (only partially successful). Reworked the counterweights and checked the balance of the LX10, spacers, RACI guider with Zwo ASI120MC-S and SCT corrector. Then worked to achieve focus... which was ultimately successful (after cranking the focus to the left substantially). Views of stars in the M31 area looked uniform and round across the whole field. Set up a job in the scheduler for the center of M31 with 80x40s light frames (repeating until 04