So finally i have first light !!!
Unless you’re a pixel peeper (and lets face it , most of us in Astrophotography are) this looked OK, but when you start to “Peep” you will find some rather bizarre artifacts, most notable to me is this below
I have star flares, spikes, or what ever you want to call them, in the end, they are NOT meant to be there ! SO how did this occur ?
Well it turns out the DEW heater is the cause. This is the repose from Celestron regarding this issue
Thank you for contacting Celestron Technical Support.
There will always be some increase in distortion with a dew heater, but extreme distortion usually means the heat is turned up too high.
You have to strike a balance between the corrector dewing up or dumping a certain amount of heat into the outer edge of the corrector (which leads to differences in expansion due to heating).
Rather than wrap the telescope tube with a heater strip requiring more heat to transfer through the telescope structure to reach the corrector, The Celestron dew ring applies heat directly to the corrector edge and so needs a lower heat setting.
Are you using either the Celestron 2X or 4X dew controller, or is the dew ring hooked up directly to power and thus running 100% by default?
The Celestron dew controller will measure the dew point and humidity and apply only the amount of heat needed to keep ahead of dew formation. This minimal “just enough” heat delivery should minimize the star distortions.
to be fair i did have the Dew heater up at about 50% power, so I’ve wound this back down to 20% and ill try again (i hope tonight) and see what i get.
Over all i am fairly happy with the tracking, and this was at the native focal length. I have the 0.7x reducer, which ill try out tonight also, and see what we get 😉
I hope you enjoy the above photo, its not good enough to add to the gallery, but hope to redo this tonight and get a nice sample !