It's been a long road to get this new scope up and running. I placed the order for the scope, the mount, and the camera in December 2022. I got lucky on the OTA--someone backed out of an order so I got it in March 2023. The camera arrived in early May, and the mount finally arrived in mid-June. As I was waiting on all this, I got in the Sagitta OAG, the Giotto-Alto flat panel/cover from PrimaLuce, the Nitecrawler, and various other YAFAs (YAFA is my personal acronym for "Yet Another F^&*ing Adapter"). Add to that the fact that the weather here in DFW has been tough, and I wasn't able to get this thing outside until June 29th. In a couple of weeks, it'll be heading out to Deep Sky West. This will be my first remote scope, so I had to learn a lot about how to get it 100% automated. But I think I'm finally there. I'll continue to put it through its paces here at home, and then I'll pack it up in the RV and head to Santa Fe.

For the first image from this beast, I chose the Sadr region because it's bright and high--kinda like me . I've been absolutely blown away by the scope and the camera. The C5 sensor is huge, which creates some challenges, but it's also pristine. Tilt analysis revealed that it's so flat, any attempt to correct any minuscule tilt error would only degrade its performance. As best I can tell, the stars are excellent all the way to the corners. And that is in no small part due to the incredible optics in the TOA130. It really delivers on the image circle Takahashi promises. I can't wait to get this under a dark sky!

The biggest challenge I've had building out this combination is the size of the gigantic filter wheel. It's so large, you could plop it on a turntable and play it at 33-and-a-third. The size of the filter wheel created a severe collision issue for this rig. On a 11"-diameter pier, it was going to be a real problem. So Tolga at Tolga Astro had some custom risers machined for me in New Jersey and that provides enough clearance for the pier (if not for the tripod I'm field testing it on right now). Another challenge was that the sensor window heater in the C5 is simply not up to the task of keeping that large sensor above the dew point all the way to the center. Pavel at Moravian tells me that they've since upgraded the heater to take care of that issue, but short of sending the camera off to the Czech Republic to have a replacement heater installed, the solution is to wrap a dew strip around the flattener to keep the front of the camera above the dew point. That seems to work fine for me, so the only place I'll be sending this camera is with the rest of the rig to Deep Sky West. I can't stomach the idea of delaying this installation more weeks or months, only to have to field test it again at home. 

One of the most shocking things to me about this combination of gear is how small the stars are that it produces. Coming from a C11 and a Z61, I'm used to severe star bloat and over time have developed my own ways for dealing with that. Those efforts are completely unnecessary with this rig.

This thing was neither cheap nor easy to put together. But based on what I'm seeing so far, it will be well worth the time, effort, and scratch. No one ever got fired for buying a Takahashi, right? Divorced, maybe. But never fired.