Hi Erik, I refurbished a 24" telescope on Mt John last spring. The sky is very dark but the seeing is not as good because Mt. John is situated in a valley with high mountains on each side and the down slope winds stir up the air. The telescope we were refurbishing was an old Optical Craftsman mount and Arne Henden (AAVSO director), Dirk Terrell (SWRI, Colorado) and I went down to bring the telescope up to modern control standards and fitting it with the capability to be operated remotely by the AAVSO. The mountain has a 1.8m telescope used for micro-lensing events, a 1 meter used for follow-up work the 24" AAVSO scope, a 24" Boller & Chivens and a 16" used by an organization called Earth & Sky that gives star parties on selected nights. A link to the University of Canterbury, Department of Physics is here: http://www.phys.canterbury.ac.nz/research/mt_john/index.shtml Some images that Dirk took while we were there are here: http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~terrell/images/nz2008mar/ Image #4 of this set is Arne & I looking over the Lake Tekapo and image #3 & #22 are the 24" telescope we were re-furbishing. A link to Earth & Sky is here: http://www.earthandsky.co.nz/ NZ is a beautiful place with the South Island outstanding. Cindy & I spent 7 days touring after we finished the work on the telescope. Jerry Foote ScopeCraft, Inc. 4175 E. Red Cliffs Dr. Kanab, UT 84741 435-899-1255 jfoote@scopecraft.com