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Hi Baz, looks like the others below have pretty well covered it. Your SCT is fine for planetary views and especially for imaging. I'd stress what a couple have already mentioned. 1) cooling... doesn't matter if the seeing is 9/10, if you haven't got your scope fully cooled you wont see much detail at all. This can take hours for a scope your size in a place like canberra... this is why people use fan coolers. 2) collimation... you have to work to get this right. Get your self some "Bob's Knobs" if you don't have 'em already and tweak your collimation. If you centre a bright star at high power - 200-300x and defocus the image it should show as a series of concentric rings of light... if these aren't perfectly concentric (when star is centred) then your collimation is out and you'll never get a decent image until it's fixed. While these factors aren't so important for low power viewing of deep sky objects, they're pretty well essential to get even half decent views of planets. Seeing is still the biggest factor, but there's not much you can do about that. cheers, Rob
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