Hi all
Neptune has been eluding me since last year. Last night I sat down with the finder charts from 'Astronomy 2006 Australia" and searched until I found it's tiny disc. It's funny you know, but for me it's like any other type of faint, fuzzy visual astronomy: in that it takes forever to find something first time, but on subsequent attempts, it's much easier to spot. I mean that not only are you more familiar with the object's location, but your eye is much more adept at picking it out from its background. Like the old adage says: "the longer you look at something, the more you actually see".
I used my 30mm GSO SV to find the field, and tracked it down with a 19mm Panoptic. I then tried my 9mm UO Ortho, and a 6mm GSO plossl. The ortho resolved the disc well, but was not very contrasty. The seeing was not good enough for the 6mm; but the best image was obtained with the Panoptic barlowed 2X with my UO 2" barlow. Fantastic.
I found the same with Uranus, which only took a couple of minutes to find. The Panoptic (barlowed) gave the best result, with the ortho performing better on the larger, brighter disc of Uranus, than Neptune (or maybe it's just my eyes getting old!)
Cheers
Dave W