Hi Doug,
OK thats not what I was expecting at all. That frame has Saturn taking up a decent part of the frame (with no or little magnification) where as when I am looking at about 250x I get the roughly the following in my field of view (excuse the rough drawing - it shows the scale at least
). How does that work? Oh well thanks for some of the detail regarding sizes etc. I guess I am going to have to do some research on arc mins and seconds etc. and get a better understanding of the concepts
Anyway setup last night (you view Saturn at all? - if you did how was your seeing?) and dark adapted (then promptly fell asleep but my daughter woke me at about 12 so it worked out well) then spent about 45mins trying to observe Saturn. Was probably 12.15 to 1.00am so almost the highest it was gonna be. Mostly used 250x and 166x (tried the barlow to 500x briefly - it's not much bigger in the field of view (does that sound about right?) I reckon and wasn't crisp etc.). Easy to track at those mags and I was mostly putting it on the edge of the view to let it move through (as opposed to trying to keep it centered so I could concentrate on the actual image).
Now in 45mins of observering maybe, just maybe at times the image changed and there could be vague details but as the image takes up so little of the field of view (refer again to my drawing) I just found it too hard to be sure. Maybe it was just my eyes maybe there actually was a subtle change in color etc.......
Hmmmm bottom line ....not sure
but I can tell you I can't wait to try Jupiter.
Cheers,
Scott