This is my first light with my new (to me) scope: the SkyWatcher Quattro 200CF using the Starizona Nexus 0.75 reducer/corrector.
Despite getting the parts in November or earlier it's been so grey every single night that I wasn't even able to finish testing and configuring and testing it until now. Brutal!

Like many astrophotographers I follow, I'm taking the similar journey of going from a smaller refractor (the Zenithstar73) up to an 8" fast optics imaging beast. I didn't go the RASA route as I wanted to continue using my filter wheel and mount and I can still achieve 600mm at f/3 and 800mm at f/4 and it's cheap! Despite getting the 2nd lightest 8" newt I could find, it's still upwards of 20lbs on my CEM26, so I was really worried whether I could handle it or not and would be forced to upgrade. To my delight, I'm actually getting as good or somehow better guiding on this heavy beast than I was on my light refractor. I noticed between 0.55 - 0.65 on average,. I'm not sure if it's just way better balanced or what, but I'll take it!

Despite collimating with a laser, once the heavy imaging train went on there it seems like things changed. My stars are a weird shape and I've got vignetting only at the top of my picture, so I'm assuming tilt is a factor here. It was already a challenge trying to figure out how to get the right back focus and using this weird, adjustable, low profile focuser to achieve focus on every filter. Despite this, I started taking shots and found that at least the nebulae are turning out great and my hope was that the magic of BXT would just make my misalignment issues disappear, and holy craparoni it worked! I want to fix my scope to be more ideal, but "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!". A step in my processing already solves the issue, so I'll keep plowing forward for now until I'm ready to fight my setup again and lose nights of imaging.

Again, I can't believe the magic of BXT on my awful stars, and now they are so round and pinpoint, not bloated like on my z73.

Here's the 1-2-3 that made me go wow:

Raw stars (blech):

BXTing those stars:

NXT just to show how damn beautiful it gets:

Ok, the stars could probably still be rounder, but damn! Especially if you aren't really pixel peeping!

Anyways, back to the main image. It was hard to choose what to image when you haven't seen the sky in 3 months. I picked a target I had written down and it appeared to be high enough in the sky for enough time that I gave it a shot. About 2hrs per SHO filter and 5min for RGB each. Wow, I can't believe the clarity and detail I got in such a short amount of exposure time!!! 200mm at f/3 baby!!!

I'm excited to see what else I can do with some more time into some images. I'm also excited to try out my SkyWatcher Quattro Corrector at the native 800mm focal length, but that will probably wait until galaxy season begins.