I went to the Wednesday Star Party on the Physics Building tonight and used one of the Meade LX200s for a couple of hours. Most of the night was taken up with mechanics - learning the Meade classic controller, connecting the scope to my laptop, and testing the Cartes du Ciel Meade telescope driver. Also using a text file of Struve's Double Star Catalogue that I found on the web ( http://www.skymap.com/struve.htm ) I was able to get a Cartes du Ciel version of Struve's catalogue going. Altogether this gave me click and slew goto capability for Struve's double stars. The techie part of the night being over, I then switched over to runing some doubles in Bootes using Sue French's _Celestial Sampler_ (pp. 92-93), Sissy Haas's _Double Stars for Small Telescopes_ and the June S&T northern binoular highlights article (p. 44). On Monday, at Little Mountain, I chart checked the position of a number of Bootes and Corona B colorful doubles using binos. Tonight I was out to try to split a few at high mags. I enjoy colorful double stars for after-work urban astronomy, but really hate to have to decode those historical Struve catalogue numbers that double star writers favor into more useable HD catalogue ids. Having a planetarium program controlling the scope and a Struve catalogue installed removed all that burdensome location decoding. Slewing north to south, Struve 1835 (white blue), Struve 1873, xi Boo (orange blue), del Boo (yellow blue), mu1 and mu2 Boo, wide pair nu1 and nu2 Boo (orange blue) were rattled off in quick succession. As I was loading up a filter wheel for planetary filter testing on Saturn, a cloud blew in and ended the night's session. With the filter wheel and a right angle in place, the Meade SCT was able to easily reach an appropriate back focus. But it was clear that an improperly executed slew potentially could chop the assembly off the scope. I didn't have a chance to measure the interferance distance from the back of the autofocuser to the bottom of the fork yok. - Kurt _______________________________________________ Sent via CSolutions - http://www.csolutions.net