Enjoy reading your reports on the planets Ed as they are favourites of mine.
I recently had my first decent view of Mars ever. Could actually see features instead of just a red dot.
Using 106x, 140x, 186x, 280x in a less than well collimated SCT, under average conditions, and looking through a lot of atmosphere, I was surprized that the image became soft going from 140x to 186x but didn’t deteriorate further when pushed to 280x.