G'day all, I tried it again this morning, but the view was not nearly as good as before. No central star this time! Looks like it really was a rogue moment of superb seeing! However had some great seeing, the best in a long time, between around 2:30-4:30am observing some planetaries at extremely high power, will post report soon. Then just before dawn, the seeing went south, but still managed to get some nice views of jupiter at 381x.
Scope was perfectly collimated, and the collimation did not budge one bit throughout the whole evening. Excellent
Dave- I reckon having active cooling has made a world of difference, this morning I took the scope from the 15C house into the 2C outside air and the mirror was near ambient in barely an hour. The old scope had an unventilated cell and no fans, and is certain it never reach ambient. I always wondered wether evenings following sunny days would average fairly poor seeing as all that heat is released.
Paddy - yes go for it! Find some tiny high sfc brightness PNs and go nuts
often I find for objects such as small galaxies and PNe's high power is superior to low. You won't find me observing Abell clusters under 300x! The contrast gained and extra resolution to compensate for the eye's poor performance in low light is invaluable.
Astrospotter- it turns out it was simply a random moment of near perfect seeing, tried it again this morning but no dice. Glad I was in the right place at the right time for once!