Congratulations Suzy on a wonderful first report. You definitely succeeded in taking us all along for a nighttime ride without leaving our PCs. That's the sort of reporting that will stimulate many others to have fun nights under the stars I'm sure. Keep 'em coming.
I've never looked through visual filters, so your impressions on UHC and OIII on M42 were interesting. Re seeing, is it possible some of the poor "seeing" early in the night was your much larger mirror still cooling? I'm hardly an expert, but have had the impression before that when my mirror hasn't reached ambient I can see waves of disturbed air inside the tube (or mirror boundary layers) slowly swirling about when the image is way out of focus in one direction. In fact if you wave your hand or a book at the end of the scope you can see the air swirl a bit more. Definitely more cooling required when you see that.....
Please keep up the good work with these. We'll expect to see many more now.
