I was there, but arrived late. I didn't get set up, collimated, and ready to view in time to see Io. I was using the Intes with the new Zeiss binoviewer and Zeiss Abbe Orthos. They really made the Intes shine. Early in the evening, it showed a distinct tube current. Later when it had stabilized I got out the screwdriver again and tweeked the collimation. It was doing a very nice job on Jupiter and Saturn. Io's shadow really poped out. Cassini's division could be seen easily. All this in spite of Bill's comments that the seeing could be better. :-)

The three of us were having a great time swapping views and playing with new toys. About an hour after I arrived, Jay showed up with a new toy. But I'll let him talk about that.

We were set up on Coulter Row and had to put up with occasional headlights, but we were mostly looking at planets so it didn't matter much. I made the mistake of looking through Michelle's 18" at the Moon. It was a low power view and my right eye was blasted with the entire image of the Moon. My right eye was seeing a large spot for quite a while after that.

The Moon was a wonderful sight in the binoviewers. Wonderful long pointed mountain shadows. I didn't take Rukl, so I'm not sure what was what, but it was fund wondering along the terminator. We watched the Aldebaran occultation. As the occultaion approached I had the GM8 on Lunar rate and Aldebaran seemed to be approaching the Moon. I switched to siderial and watched the Moon swallow Aldebaran. A fun sight. I just missed its reappearance by microseconds. I was slewing up the limb and asked Bill if he knew where it would emerge. He said "There" (when it appeared) just as I slewed into it.

Bill and I played with eyepieces in the binoviewers. We tried a 15mm Panoptic against a 16mm Zeiss Abbe Ortho. In his LX200 we could see no difference in discernible detail. I had tried this same comparison at home in either the Takahashi or Intes (can't remember) and there was a distinct difference in the amount of detail I could see on both the Moon and Jupiter. Interesting that this didn't show up in the LX200. Bill suggested that if it had been the Tak, he could understand that the quality difference in the scopes would account for the different results.

The Panoptic had a significantly wider view and the image was bluish. The image through the Zeiss was greenish. Since we all know that the Moon is made of green cheese, I conclude that the Zeiss has the truer color. :-) The contrast was very similar in both, but they were looking through all of the glass in the binoviewer.