[masraum]

Right, eight 14" scopes and four 11" scopes all on piers 15' apart. His back yard must look like the Very Large Array.

On a related note, I took the scope that I bought from Mike out last night. It was only about a 2 hour session and not long viewing like I usually did in the past (years ago, in bright skies in a Houston suburb), but the sky was very clear and very dark. The scope is a C8 Nexstar Evo. It works great. I usually look at 10-20 targets for longer periods of time and often go back and forth between them, but since I knew this wasn't going to be that sort of session, and I hadn't planned anything, I let the mount/controller take me through a tour. I think I bounced through about 50 targets, double stars, galaxies, clusters (open and closed) nebula and even a couple of planets. It was really nice. Most of my viewing was only at 113x, but I also hit 156x and 226x. The seeing was marginal for 226x, but not bad at 156x. Although I reserved that mostly for double stars. I thought it was pretty funny when the handset said that it was going to show me the horsehead nebula. My site isn't that dark. Doesn't that one need a REALLY dark site and maybe also a filter? The Orion nebula was very impressive. I've never seen it that brightly or with that much structure. And while Andromeda is never really breathtaking, it was really neat to see M31, M32 and M110. I need to get my camera out there and play with shooting and stacking a bunch of stills. It's nothing spectacular that way (no GEM or tracking or anything like that), but hey, I took it.

It was a short sweet session. I'm looking forward to getting some more EP and spending more time outside.

I'm currently planning on getting an APM 24mm 65º or maybe a TV Panoptic 24mm 68º, although people seem to really like the APM and it saves some money from the TV. Then a Baader Morpheus 17.5mm 76º, TV Delite 15mm 62º and finally a Explore Scientific 11mm 82º. And I've got a 2x Barlow. I think those should give me a good range of views with decent TFOV.