>>10940101It can take an hour or two for such a large mirror to reach thermal equilibrium with the air, so it's best to setup some time before you start observing, to let it cool, and minimize turbulent refraction. A camera you can manually focus would help, since autofocus algorithms almost never work well where low light is lowered further by high magnification. (I've an old Sony point & shoot with 10X optical zoom that can, just barely, get Jupiter + moons, but only after the auto-focus is given several attempts.) I used to have a 6" f8 Newtonian that I had to give up when becoming too disabled to lug around (the mount alone weighed about 40 pounds) and with it the Cassini division didn't pop out at you most nights, so your collomination can't be far off if it's obvious through twice as much aperture. The seeing conditions, night-by-night, made a surprisingly bigger difference with the planets than, say, a populous cluster like M11, which almost always looked amazing when close to zenith. Given two different very clear nights that look about the same to the unaided eye, on one Jupiter would look so blah that I could only detect the presence of the equatorial bands, while on the other their mottled boundaries & colors, along with higher latitude detail, would show with a richness that brought it near. It always surprised me how easily such a small telescope can separate close binaries, down to 1 arc-second, since that's about the limit for long exposures through the largest ground-based telescopes without adaptive optics.
