Wednesday night was clear and reasonably dark for my urban skies, but nonetheless I had a devil of time getting started with my newly acquired (used) Starlight Xpress MX-916 CCD camera. The previous owner sold it to me with a Nikon lens adapter, so I decided to keep things simple for my first time out and use just the MX-916 and a 300mm f/4 Nikkor on my Super Polaris mount. I figured that at that short focal length, I could do a p.a. scope alignment and nothing more.
Well, after 1 hour of setup, re-setup, checking, re-checking, tweaking and re-tweaking, I still had only faint, bloated, trailed star images on my screen. It began to dawn on me that the Nikon lens adapter wasn't properly spaced, at least not the way I had it attached to the camera, and so I couldn't reach focus.
I switched to my Celestron 80mm f/5 "shorttube" refractor. The good news was that I was able to focus. The bad news was that everything was still trailing badly. I put an eyepiece on the scope and sure enough, the drive wasn't driving, even though it was making noise. I suspect there's a short somewhere in the line. I messed with the cables and reattached them several times, and eventually got it driving. The MX-916 was re-attached and...
The third time was a charm! Now I was getting images. By then I was tired, but I did collect two before packing up, one of M41 and one of M46 (the planetary is just visible). Check 'em out at:
http://members.home.com/psterngold/first mx916.html
(Both images were in the 2x2 binned mode, no dark frame, no flat field.)
I'm pleased with these results. They bode well for the future with this camera. The MX-916 has a 752 x 580 array of 11.6 x 11.2 micron pixels. I believe it will be well matched for the C11 at f/6.3, and at f/10 binned 2x2.