[Wavytone]

Last night was nicely set up, and after an hour or so my monster mak had cooled nicely and the seeing had settled down around 8-9 out of 10, I decided to do what the previous owner hadn't dared touch in 10 years - tweak the collimation just a tad to get it spot-on. Centred on Spica at 300X, defocussed a tad and unscrewed the cover off the back of secondary - this scope is a RuMak, not a Gregory Maksutov.

My AZEQ6 was set up in altaz mode and, being somewhat lazy I'd forgotten to do up the opposing screws that lock the azimuth of the mount.

So, while tweaking one of the collimating screws behind the secondary the mount shifts in azimuth. Bugger.

Screwed the az tight and to redid the alignment sequence.

10 minutes later and back on target, followed by another 10 minutes of tweaking the secondary,

With the collimation nailed spot-on it really showed what is possible when the scope sticks ALL THE PHOTONS smack bang where there should be. What this also showed in comparison with 2 other scopes side by side is just how the optical performance suffers when photons are not going where they should be, either as a result of poor collimation, poor seeing, or inferior optics.

Fair to say that in 40 years I've never seen Jupiter or especially Saturn as well as last night.