I want to send this off before I read what Brent wrote about the little filter test that we did on Friday night. I do want to point out that Chuck, Brent and other still need to get together and try the filter comparison. We spent a couple of hours on Friday night looking at Saturn and Jupiter as well as some double stars. There was a high, thin layer of clouds that made galaxies and nebulas look real dim. We didn't play with the filters at all on Saturn. It was real pretty. We saw enke's minima and the gossimer ring in by the planet. I was unable to run my 8" telescope at anywhere near the power that Brent had his telescope running. I think that both of my Barlows are bad and I need to purchase a new one. The image simply went fuzzy and wouldn't focus properly. Eventually we looked at Jupiter. In Brent's scope, at high power, I could clearly see the the GRS. It had a nice eyebrow above it. I could also see that along the two main cloud bands there was some faint cloud structure. When we looked through the 80A filter the faint structure went away. In fact the cloud band actually appeared to shrink by that much thickness. When I went back to my 8" scope, I couldn't see the structure. Since I couldn't make the planet any bigger, I put the filter on the eyepiece. I couldn't see any extra detail to anything that was visible. I could see more cloud bands. The conclusion that I have come to is, that color filters are useful to bring out coarse detail at low power. It will show the public that Jupiter has a bunch of cloud bands instead of just two when you are running low power at a public star party. If you really want to see the fine details, you need to run the power way up and leave off the filter. Dave