Oi, Dave Auld!
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Since this is partly your fault... :) A few weeks ago the Mrs was asking what I wanted for Birthday/Christmas and I had just been looking at some of your pictures. So I got a Celestron 5SE. Seemed like a good budget way to start (I'm an Aberdonian too!). So today I unpacked and assembled it, since it was *the* day to see the Saturn and Jupiter conjunction. Luckily the clouds cleared just in time and I got a great view. I could see Saturn's rings (kind of blended into one big one) and Jupiter's moons. UPS seems to have been gentle on it since I did not need to collimate it. It was pretty breezy so the atmosphere wasn't ideal and it was blowing the telescope a bit, but not too bad. (I live in Kuna, Idaho - high desert - so I expect much better conditions in the next few weeks, albeit colder!) I didn't try the auto align yet since the Starfinder scope worked really well and I manually slewed it but it looks really useful if it works as advertised. Now, of course, I need another eyepiece. It came with a 25mm which is good for 50x I believe, but the useful magnification is in the 125-175 range (I think 300 max). Any recommendations, or is pretty much any eyepiece from a reputable source going to be fine?