Here is the 'first light' for  a telescope I've had since 2016 or so.  I bought an Orion 203/1000 f/4.9 Newtonian for use as a visual scope mounted on a DIY ALT-AZ goto mount.  It was $250 then.  I had honestly never even remotely considered using this for astrophotography until I saw some beautiful images by Jonathan MacCollum,  I looked at the gear he was using and was stunned to find it was the same scope that had been sitting in my closet collecting dust for many years.  I reached out to him and he had some great advice for getting this scope ready for imaging. 

First thing I had to do was clean the mirror, it was caked with drywall dust from when I finished my basement, apparently the cover was off for an extended period during that time.  The edge of the mirror was poorly turned down so I printed out an aperture mask that covered the outer 2mm and also included some small circular lobes to cover the mirror clips.  I found a program called spherofront that allowed me to simulate the diffraction pattern of any mask that I could draw up. The results of those were fairly interesting in themselves, You can see some of the masks and simulations here.   I also replaced the focuser with a low profile rack and pinion and fitted it with a stepper motor for auto focus. Among other things I installed a 0.5W heater on the secondary, painted the secondary edge with black 2.0, flocked the tube with protostar flockboard and modified a celestron 17.5" bar for the C9.25 to use with my scope rings.  I should nickname this thing Frankenstein's Monster.

It was a bit windy and the seeing was not great but I'm pretty happy with the results I was able to get. I still have some bugs to work out.  Based on what my flats looked like I don't think I have the secondary perfectly centered above the focuser. The gradients were pretty extreme and stacking images across the meridian flip left a large dark S shape across the center of the image.  Fortunately I was able to salvage it with the normalize scale gradient script and a round of DBE with very dense samples over the strong gradient.

I had been considering an SCT for a while but I think the 950mm FL of this scope fits better with my typical seeing conditions and my wallet prefers the newtonian as well.