It's a relief to finally get the FSQ up and running in its permanent home. As with the CDK, this required 15 months of planning, procurement, configuration, testing, and final setup. FSQs are hard to get! I ordered the OTA and 645 reducer in March 2023 and they finally arrived in November.

For this rig, I went with the Moravian C3 instead of the C5. The FSQ is pretty notorious for wonky stars in the corners of the newer full-frame, small-pixel CMOS sensors. This unit was no exception. I wanted to go with a C5 to take advantage of the expansive field its sensor offers (I'm using C5s on my TOA130 and CDK12 and love them). But Tolga convinced me that was a bridge too far even though Takahashi advertises a 60mm image circle for the FSQ with 645 reducer. Then in November, Russ Croman released the new version of BXT, which is capable of doing what the 645 cannot do--correcting the astigmatism in the corners. If I'd known, I'd have put a C5 on this rig as well. I intend to use this scope primarily to shoot mosaics, and the extra 20% in the C5's fov would have really been nice.

Still, I can't complain too much about saving $15k on the camera and filters. And I already had a collision issue with the C3 on the GM1000 mount. A C5 would have exacerbated that. Fortunately, I was able to solve that issue by repurposing Optec's Libra dovetail, which is actually intended for aligning dual rigs. That saved me from having to have custom risers machined. And it provides the bonus of being able to adjust for cone error. 

When I first started field testing this setup, I had severe tilt issues. I spent three nights struggling with that. I don't know where it was coming from--the camera, the focuser, or the OTA. And the inherent astigmatism makes analyzing and adjusting the tilt very challenging. It could well be a collimation issue, but after waiting for this scope to arrive for the better part of nine months, I'm loathe to send it off to Takahashi for a look-see. Life is short, and it's time for this thing to start earning its keep.

So on to the image at hand. As always, I make no claim to perfection in my work. I'm just a retired, unfrozen, caveman lawyer. The world of optics and sensors and filters and PSFs and and FWHMs and Strehls frightens and confuses me. But I've always wanted to try to capture the IFN surrounding M81 and M82. Given where I started with all this in 2019, I'm ecstatic with this long-awaited result. I was also surprised at the large HII regions 17 hours of Ha revealed (left center and upper right). I had never seen those before. So here is my wide field M81 and M82. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Edited to add: Steve Mandel has informed me that the areas I thought were HII regions are actually called extended red emissions (EREs) and are the result of the presence of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the dusty lanes of the IFN.