For some time now I've been wanting to shoot at native focal length of this telescope, but never got up the will power to remove the reducer and set it up for imaging at F10. I've been trying out a new piece of software, SkyWave, which helps you collimate your SCT using the wavefront error as predicted by an AI model. Part of this process had me take out the reducer and use bin 1 to extract the most detail during the collimation process. The process works on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the best. I was able to get collimation to a 9.9, which I think was pretty good. After that process I played a waiting game for the weather to turn nice again to give me a chance to get out and image while the setup is at F10.

That night finally came, and I set my sights on M64. This target turned out surprisingly good considering the conditions. Seeing wasn't great because a cold front just blew through, and wind was up to 17 mph. Many of my focus runs wouldn't complete because wind gusts made the stars blurry at different points throughout the focus run. I had FWHM as high as 6 on some frames, and as low as 2.1 on some frames. Despite that, everything integrated fine and stars actually look round. That meant that any additional detail I could bring out would have to come from sharpening techniques. 

First thing I noticed was there was little to no vignette without the reducer. All chromatic aberrations caused by the reducer are gone. This makes me think that I'm likely never going to use the reducer again, and will probably sell it. Star colors look great. The red channel was less in focus than others, so some neutral colored stars have a slight red fringe from larger star profiles in that channel. I think without the wind, and decent focus runs, this combination is going to be awesome. One other thing to note, is that the pixel scale at this focal length is slightly better (.76*/pixel) than the reduced focal length pixel scale (1.09*/pixel). Because the pixel scale Is increased, so is the detail, and this pixel scale gets me much closer to the resolvable detail of the telescope. I'm also surprised that this is a single night shooting this galaxy at F10, and I honestly thought at F10 it might take two to three nights of imaging to get a quality image.