I' m jealous, all you folks at dark sky sights. I ended up in my backyard with my Meade 8 SCT. I recently bought a Coulter 10.1 inch dob, and also bought an Orion collimating eyepiece. The instructions said you could use the collimator on an SCT, so I figured what the heck. A few days earlier I had used the collimater on the SCT in my garage. Sure is nice doing this in a comfortable postion out of the sun. Anyway, it looked to me like it was way out so I did some major tweaking. You really can't get a fine coillimation on an SCT with this, so that night I took it out for a few minutes, and after some minor tweaks it was in great shape. The previous week I was having trouble splitting the double double, but it was a cinch after the collimation.

Last night in my backyard the seeing was as good as it's ever been, and I saw more detail in Jupiter than I ever have in my SCT, no matter what dark site I've been at. I'm anxious now to get the SCT out to a good dark site and see how it does.