The revision will have the mirror cell and mirror shown from behind as packed.  The primary and secondary are shipped unmounted, though the telescope is collimated, etc in the shop.  Save it from getting shipping damage. 

I have mentioned that this scope was on order since this Fall.  Also, to reiterate, this purchase was to  be used as a survey, photometry instrument and chosen for its capability well into the NIR spectrum, which for me would make this sort of work very much more fun and interesting.  I will have more to say about why this choice and as to how I want(ed) to set it up and hope to still get the chance.

Unfortunately, it is not weather in the Pacific NW that will hamper my first light experience.  It is the fact that 4 weeks ago, I was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (or AML for short).  So instead of assembling this baby, I am into my second day of chemotherapy.  And this will be a month process, before I can get my hands on it.  The prognosis for AML is complicated by the fact that AML is a catch term for a sizable collection of different forms.  My genetic form is considered to be one of the more favorable for prognosis.  This is why I have been so very much less active here lately.  So having gotten that out of the way, I will spew on about what I planned to do with this baby.  Just because I like to spew (you all know that!) and for anyone else who is interested in giving this a go.

I considered a number of other telescope configurations.   1.But the # one reason is that I wanted a light path containing only reflective surfaces.  IR and NIR signals can  be greatly attenuated by optical coatings (not all, maybe not even many) and it takes great pains to get a manufacturer to tell you how their scopes perform in NIR.  And, no I would never trust a sales person to tell me the truth about that kind of stuff.  Also, so many optics come from China and they are notorious for not providing good information on that kind of stuff, which seems to frustrate the retailers here.  This goes for reflective surfaces as well.  Most of the Chinese mirror optics are dielectric and on the scopes made here, many of the optics come from China.  Well dielectics are often used for specific band pass filters, and unless you want one to reflect NIR well, it better be designed to.  Again, none of the retailers of scopes from China, or who use Chinese optics could give me a transmittance or reflectance graph vs wavelength that provided information above 700 nm.  I want to work at 1000 nm (and above at some point).  So that eliminated some of the decent Newtonians, Cassegrains, and RCs available at a reasonable price.  I needed to find a simple aluminum, enhanced aluminum, or enhanced aluminum protected with a simple dielectic coating.  These are more guaranteed to give me what I want.  Also, in the not-to-distant future, I may want to strip the coatings anyway and replace with a high end silver coating, which is ideal and can be done with aluminized mirrors, but not dielectrics.  The TS scopes use this type of coating.  Yes, their reflectivity is only in the mid 90%, but that is ok for the reasons stated. 2. Second if I could have found an RC with the right optics, I likely would have not gone in that direction.  Reason being is their very long focal length coupled with my small sensor NIR camera makes for a poor match for the type of survey work I would like to do.  I am not interested in just getting light curves of one star at a time.  (Even if I upgrade to a higher end one in the future, it will be to extend my reach to well above 1000 nm and these all are still small sensors.  Though I would always find out how much $$$ the sensors are they use in Webb!)

It was my intent to put this scope onto a mount platform that would allow me to "hit" many targets each night over an over again, night after night.  And I would prefer to no guiding.  After a lot of research I narrowed my search to mounts that rely on high end, high resolution encoders.  I also am planning (fingers crossed!) to do mostly shorter exposures.  There are many YSO and the like out there that are not so dim as to required 20 minute exposures.  And I am especially interested in objects that cycle in minutes or even less (yes they exist),  So no guiding!  Just point, shoot, shoot, shoot, etc., move, shoot, shoot, etc.  Photometry also does not need perfectly focused stars.  In fact defocusing can improve results.  So I will make a decision on autofocus, at least frequent autofocus.  But I would need to set the amount of defocus I would want, and that could be a challenge.  I think I can actually program that in NINA.  The best mount I could find for that was the PlaneWave L350.  It is also a very fast mount.  In fact probably too fast, I am sure that I will dial back its maximum slew speed.  All the advantages as the several others that I could find, with the advantage of never having to deal with meridian flips.  I had a line on one that was available currently, nearby my location, but my health setback froze that purchase.   Also, this was all supposed to happen someplace other than western Oregon.  Kind of ridiculous to try to do this sort of project with only 4-5 months a year, max, and sketchy weather even during those months.

To make things a lot more efficient in data collection, I planned to build my own "Webb-style" detector based on image/beam splitting.  That means I will collect both images at exactly the same time!  Another interesting NINA/computer challenge!  Yes you can buy such a thing even now, with the advent of On Axis Focusing, which uses a high quality larger beam/image splitter to feed an RGB signal to one camera, and the NIR/IR image to the guide camera.  I will likely build my own, since I don't want to lose that much backfocus and $$$ for a unit that is designed to do full-frame imaging.  I have a source for a good quality for such a filter that would suit my small sensors.  I would buy another of QHY NIR cameras which I have demonstrated on a number of postings on this site at 950 nm and to some longer wavelength.  The camera is very nice and is back illuminated.  Which is good, because the one weakness of the camera is that it is color and has a Bayer layer.  No problem for NIR/IR, they all pass the Bayer unaffected.  But for the vis image, I will likely use a industry standard violet filter and I want all the pixels to report.  Bayer layers can be scraped off using a number of methods.  If this was a $2000 camera, I might think twice about it, but its not and I might even give it a shot myself.  Or I might get it done professionally.  Being back illuminated means that there is little danger of screwing up the wires on the surface of most front illuminated CMOS sensors.

So feel free to tell me that I am crazy!  That is ok!  I expect that I will make lot of errors.  Some in judgment during this planning and some that will only be discovered after I start doing this.  That is ok.  Finding and fixing mistakes and misjudgments will be half the problem.  Also, if it evolved into something that can do something else well, then I will go that direction.  But I have lined up a lot of target fields, with many target stars, some of which have published reports on data such as this.  While most deep sky astronomy (including astrophotography) targets that rarely if ever change in ones lifetime, let alone millennia, I find objects that "do" things to be very interesting.  Some of these include simple variables, eclipsing variables, eclipsing planets, circumstellar disks (especially lumpy ones), LGM with signal lights, etc.

I also purchased a paracorrector in case I want to do regular imaging.  This will not be needed for my small vis/ir sensor cameras.  I also bought a small secondary so that I can even do visual imaging.  This will improve contrast and may be better for planetary imaging if only using the center of the image circle.

So with all these plans, my first light will certainly be an image that I can logically post here.  I have my eye on M 51, since I would like to see that I get improved resolution with my 12 inch.  I have also seen M 51 at 950 nm and it is not uninteresting, though nothing like the visible image.  But it is neat to see that galaxy only with stars of a completely different population of stars.

Finally, A big hurdle will be data processing may stars simultaneously.  I am expecting to have to learn some programing there.  But there are precedents and maybe I can lean on others to assist.  

So there it is.  Hopefully this will interest someone else here.  I may also post a similar such thing on sites that are specifically used to share data on standard variable star data collection.  I may do some of this,  but it mostly not my cup of tea.  Reasons explained above.  I may end up following 10,000 stars and get not a single hit, but I am ok with that!