Joe, A small group of us went out to Skull Valley on Saturday night. We had two 8" scopes, a couple of binoculars and a very nice 12.5" F8 planetary scope I built last year. The skies were awesome. The Milky Way was a cloud of stars with dark ribbons threading their way throughout. The Andromeda Galaxy was an easy naked eye object as were a few star clusters near by. With the 12.5" scope, you could just barely make out the central star in the Ring Nebula with averted vision, and we had great views of a dozen or so M objects that night that were all easy pickings because they were SO Bright against the ink blank night sky. The biggest problem we had was that there were so many stars it was difficult to pick out the constellations compared to what we are used to here in the Salt Lake Valley. At the end of the evening, we were treated with wonderful views of mars. We could see the South polar cap, a dark band around the cap, tons of surface features, and what looked like a storm or possibly the very edge of the northern polar cap directly opposite the Southern polar cap. John R. Zeigler www.JohnsTelescopes.com www.MirrorKits.com