We had excellent views of Mercury and Venus from SPOC last night. Using the Ealing, we had to open the roof over the Grim bay to access that part of the sky. Afterwards Mars and Saturn were both crisp, and M42 was showing detail usually reserved for the 32". Speaking of last night, the seeing was excellent. It was one of those nights where the transparency was superb, and there was virtually no turbulence. Sirius was practically not twinkling! The best seeing I have experienced at SPOC has always been at about this time of year, usually after a storm has cleared the air. A couple of years ago, Erik and I both saw the North America nebula easily with the naked eye, again about this time of year IIRC. We saw several prominences around the limb of th sun before sundown, as well as one active region on the disk itself, using my PST.