I just got in and was able to access my computer.

Friday night was superb. I was in a fairly dark sky with good views to the NE and E. Transparency was excellent, seeing was only fair but that did not matter as I was going deep sky viewing with my 4 inch. There were several surprises during the 3.5 hour session.

Most of the time was spent in Cassiopeia and Cepheus with a side trip to Pegasus for good measure. Cassiopeia has an excellent collection of open clusters and emission nebula to chose from. I generally used my 10mm Delos and the 24 mm Panoptic supplemented with the 6mm Delos. This is the ideal time to use a small scope with wide fields and an ultrablock when required.

First surmise was being able to see Wildt's red star with the 4 inch. Wildt's is a double star that is fairly dim in the outskirts of NGC 7789. It takes a patient eye to see it due to the color and being around 10.5 magnitude. In a larger scope it is a lot easier, the color being more apparent. With patience I found it at 56x and looking very closely around the edge of 7789. 7789 is fairly dim and extended. A beautiful cluster it requires a dark sky and larger aperture to appreciate. To find Wildt's you need to carefully search the outer edges. It did appear best in the 6mm Delos. It does require averted vision to see the red tint with a small scope. Not able to be seen from the city. I was surprised to be able to do it in the 4 inch frankly. That took about 1/2 an hour.

Roy, an idea target for your 80mm with a wide lens w/filter is to located the open cluster NGC 7510 in Cepheus. It is tight and small but the great thing about it is the surrounding emmission nebula Sharpless 2-157. Using a filter and a wide view you can trace the extent and boundary of the nebula easily. The borders are very well defined and looks exactly like the chart shows; very well define. You get added bonus of finding IC 1470, an emission nebula that is very bright and obvious. Use a wide look here. If you use a big scope you miss the show due to narrow fields. You will also see NGC 7538 nebula also. This needs a dark sky but is worth the trouble.

What can I say? The double cluster at 20x in a refractor is just astounding. Pin point stars on a black field. Doesn't matter how many times you have seen it. Wide fields low power here too. If you zoom in it just does not live up to what it can be.

New Orthoscopic eyepiece report:

I tested the Baader 10mm orthoscopic eyepiece that night on Saturn and Jupiter. The planets were not ideal seeing wise but they were still good enough to get some feel for this lens. No one hardly makes a classic ortho design anymore which is too bad as for some things they cannot be beat. Baader and Carl Zeiss have some sort of connection stretching back some decades. It appears that Baader got the technical design of the now classic and horribly expensive Zeiss oculars. A set of Zeiss orthos goes for about 4000.00 dollars now and that may be 0.916 eyepieces at that.

Using the current Baader 10mm model in conjunction with a Vernonscope 2.4 Dakin Barlow you get the feel you are using an old design that has not been updated but has that superb resolution of the original. Not at all like the University Circle T volcano tops (which are quite good), but the older, more original, design to what Ernst Abbe originally built. It has a fairly tight eye relief and an odd but very functional one sided  eye cup (another old design) but is quite usable at 50 degrees fov and the eye cup works.  Now for the good part. NO ghosting and reflections. Very very subtle color and shade differences in the bands of Saturn were detectable with the Baader. Of course it was sharp but what really makes an impression on you is the ability to resolve those shading differences. Much like using a fine old Galen. If you have ever used one you know what I mean.

Jupiter was having a shadow transit and the moon's shadow was razor sharp. Interesting top like a recessed volcano top but not like the University Optics. Older. This is like owning a modern classic. From B&H photo at a steal price. Not for deep sky but a planetary/lunar ocular.