This was a test on multiple fronts. While the image itself is certainly nothing special I am thrilled with the outcome. The image itself had (and still has) some awful gradients caused from the Moon and street lights on the left side and it was absolutely horrible on the right side from my OAG sticking way too far into the light path. I can fix those things later!

What I am happy about was my corners are back to being near perfect now. I replaced the 1/4" (6.4mm) M48 spacer between the OAG and the CCDT67 Telecompressor with a new 1/2" (12.8mm) spacer I got from Agena Astro. Sure hard to beat this kind of improvement for $16!! My corners were absolutely awful with the other spacer with my image scale at 0.93"/pixel. The added spacing increased this to 0.961"/pixel and I am just amazed at the difference. I'll be making a new post to my blog in a few days that will document this change along with some detailed images. The Aberration Inspector in PixInsight shows a dramatic improvement! http://little-piney-observatory.blogspot.com/

Another thing I'm thrilled about is the diffraction patterns. While it doesnt show it much is this test shot the diffraction around my stars is much improved after removing the secondary dew heater. It was just slightly bigger than the secondary holder on my RC and even though I split the wiring up it still left an ugly diffraction mess. The weird spikes on the right side of this one is surely caused by the prism of the OAG being too far into the light path. Again, this can be fixed. I hope!

The fix to the dew heater problem came from my friend Madratter. I made myself a homemade dew shield and tried his solution of strapping a dew heater around the center part of the tube. I put mine a little past halfway closer to the primary mirror. It seems to be working like a champ even though my RC is the carbon fiber tube version. Dew shield was soaking wet this morning but my scope was dry both inside and out! Now to work on some of these other issues! I feel I have taken a couple giant steps forward. Although I still have some things to work out, its nice to finally feel good about something again.