At long last, a decently flat field with the RASA8. It only took a year!

To be fair, I bought this RASA8 last summer and haven't been able to use it aside from a few days in Christmas and a few days since I have been back from university. Trying to adjust tilt and backfocus with this telescope is a nightmare since unless you have a QHY camera your only choice is to shell out lots of money for a beefy adapter that cuts into your aperture. 

Like many a poor RASA8 owner I have tried every adapter under the sun. Nothing I seemed to do worked as well as I wanted it to. The breakthrough finally came when I got a hyperstar for my C6. For those out of the loop, the way you are supposed to adjust the hyperstar is to make adjustments until your four corners are the same.

Hmmmmm.... I wonder, would that work for the RASA? Perhaps. My first clue that it would was when I was "collimating" the RASA and no matter how hard you reefed on the screws the doughnut would barely move - but the corners would. Now, every forum thread out there about tilt on the RASA practically begs people not to touch the collimation screws at all unless you want to send your RASA back to the factory to get fixed.  I was out of options so I said to hell with it, lets see what happens. After all, a RASA is just a glorified hyperstar, right?

I hooked up enough extensions to expose the collimation screws even with my 294MM screwed onto the RASA. Then, with the help of my eyes and CCD Inspector I messed with the screws in small adjustments until I have the four corners relatively the same with little to no tilt. After that I took off the extensions, replaced them with my modified Starizona filter slider with a few spacers and bam! Flat field with good stars. A tri-bahtinov mask confirmed that the collimation was still good.

In one night I went from getting ready to sell this thing out of frustration to having the flattest field I have ever seen from it, and more importantly, a reliable way to adjust tilt in the future. So a PSA for all you RASA8 owners out there. Touch the collimation screws! It's the best thing you can possibly do for your RASA.

With that I give you the Elephant Trunk in HA from Bortle 8. This is a two panel, two hour mosaic with 1 hour per panel. I'd do other channels but the weather sucks and The Veil awaits.