The clouds finally parted for a while tonight. I decided to sieze the night and take a look at jupiter. 

The first look with my XT8 simply blew me away.  My old 6 inch piece of junk let me see the moons and maybe 2 bands of color on a good night.  The seeing tonight wasn't anywhere near good and I managed to spot at least four bands.

It took a little patience to just let it drift across at 96X and watch for the good flashes.  I was going to move on to some clusters, but the seeing went from poor to horrible in about 30 seconds. 

Maybe next time. 

Jupiter is about all that I'm viewing lately for clouds of a different nature... I live in central California and there are several fires that are hazing up the sky big time... most of the days are gray and at night I can barely make out constellations... so much for finding DSOs.. but Jupiter does look pretty cool in the xt8 ( I have the same scope) I get the best resolution around 96x... Some nights I got up 240x... the other night I tried to find the red spot but could only get very small glimpses of it... I'm wondering if a filter would help bring it out..... One cool thing that I observed a couple of weeks ago.. was Io casting its shadow onto Jupiter's surface as it made its transit across.. ... how's your eyepiece collection?... I only have 2 the 10mm and the 25mm sirius plossls and a 2x barlow... Anyways, hopefully both of our skies will clear up

I also have the Orion Explorer II 7-21 zoom lens.  It's a little dimmer than the plossl's, but it gives me a few more options.  Along with my shorty barlow, it keeps me interested.

 Speaking of that barlow lens, I need to do some research and see if one of my ancestors invented that. 

Chuck Barlow     

HEY, i saw jupiter a few nights ago too, it was amazing. I will continue to watch it and try some filters out as well