After a long evening of polar aligning The C-11 I’m ready to test it out for imaging.
This rig is my OSC (one shot color) work horse. The configuration shown is with the DSLR camera mounted on the back and a focal reducer mounted inside the orange focuser. This focal reducer takes the native F-10 focal length (FL) of this scope down to about F-6.3 which allows me to take shorter duration images. Longer duration gathers more photons but also adds the risk of guiding errors which give me those funny looking oval shaped stars you see in some of my images.
Once I feel I’ve nailed the guiding imaging at F-6.3 I’ll switch over to Hyperstar which will drop the focal length to F-2. Imaging at F-2 is really forgiving in the area of guiding so if I can nail it at the longer FL I’ll be able to really push the limits at the much faster F-2.