Here is something that I just sent out to OAS that I thought some of you might like as well. We recently had to buy a new mount for our SolarMax. We found that the cost of adding a 100mm refractor to the mount was cheap so we purchased cheap 100mm refractor and mount. Monte Cristo was quite fun last week. Dale Hooper and I enjoyed great views on Wednesday night. It rained a little bit in the afternoon. It then cleared off and dried up. The ground was dry and the air was perfectly clean. You couldn't even see a laser pointer. I spent most of the night pulling in planetary nebulas and faint galaxies. I really enjoyed the blue color that many of the planetaries had. M51 was fantastic. Thursday night, Dale and I stayed out a bit later. The viewing wasn't quite as good but was still great. I saw M33 through the 16" and saw why it is call the pinwheel, very pretty. Friday and Saturday, it clouded over quite a bit of the sky and the smoke was real heavy in the rest of the sky. We did see a few good things but the sky wasn't as good. The most noticeable object that I remember was the Cat's eye. It showed the elongated shape and some detail in BOB. On Saturday night we finally got to look at the Moon and Jupiter with the new refractor. The images are really nice. It does an excellent job of pulling in the white bands that are right next to the dark bands on Jupiter. I took it to 500 X on the Moon. It focused clear and tracked ok. We need to get our north alignment a little better. The anti fringe filter castes a green tint to everything. That isn't bad when you are viewing something bright. However, as Brent Watson demonstrated to me in St. George at a star party, the use of the filter takes away from the detail that you can see. The detail lost isn't worth getting rid of a little purple glow. Craig and I both really preferred the unfiltered image where we could see so much detail. I can see using the filter the way you would a Moon filter. Use it when the public is viewing and the object is too bright for them to see quickly. If you are viewing and can take the time to get used to the image, you will see a lot better detail. Thanks, David Dunn