Thanks all for the nice comments! It was one of the most pleasantly surprising days of my life. Making my OH a pie, a cake and getting her some flowers on Sat was just the start of eating back into all those brownie points she earned!
First light was last night, traditionally on Alpha Centauri, collimation was pretty good, and the views were jaw-dropping, even through my collection of old and relatively cheap eyepieces. Will write up a fuller observation report at some point, but even in pretty mediocre transparency, there were dozens of objects visible in the SMC (using
Paddy's charts for ID, his
tour is next up for me), globulars sparkle, Neptune and Uranus were tiny crisp disks, and Triton was visible in the best conditions near the end of twilight. With the UHC filter, six nebulae were easy in the south part of the SMC. I never thought I'd be resolving lots of stars in NGC330, and basically didn't recognise it after views through my 4.5" and an 8". I thought the little cluster L56 was NGC330, then panned away from NGC346 ... and wondered what the big resolved cluster was that was appearing in the field! Not surprisingly, objects fairly whizz thorugh the field at high power (>~250x), but of course viewing the SMC you could take your time at high power, as the objects don't pass through the field so quickly, being near the Pole. High cloud spoilt the latter part of the evening, but was a good first night. Optics look to be excellent, and only a couple of small gripes with the scope (azimuth bearing too smooth, and the eyepiece slot can be a bit 'sticky' - inconvenient when the azimuth bearing is slippy as the scope can move on swapping eyepieces). 16" is fun...