Eyepiece arrived in the post yesterday. Baader Hyperion Mk III Clickstop Zoom. Quite a mouthful. Quite an eyepiece as well. All very well wrapped and in great condition (thanks Jim). Managed a late evening view of the moon between the clouds and was mightily impressed. Very happy with it and I now have a decent range of eyepiece strength all to myself for my scope. Happy days. As Rune commented on another post, the equivalent barlow is worth looking into methinks.

Finished 'Handbook of Astronomical Image Processing' this week as well. It's one hell of a book, and gloriously heavy duty. Just the kind of low level detail I was after. I will hand it back to the society today at the social meeting, which looks like a clear sky evening as well as a bonus. Will take the Atik 16c software to install on the society laptop and see if we can get it working properly tonight.

Also, as my entry into photography, it is clear that I really need my own scope to do this, rather than rely on the society ones. I am coming up to a milestone birthday, so am going to pool resources and get a decent future-proofish mount and a nice AP ready scope. I will keep my Astromaster for casual viewing and learning the skies with my new Hyperion EP. 'Turn Left at Orion' arrived this week as well to help with my sky learning, so its all coming together nicely.

The kit I am looking at is an HEQ5 Syntrek (no goto) and a Skywatcher Evostar 80ED. This looks like a decent starter AP kit as well as something I will use as long as it holds together. It has the benefit of lots of users on this forum and around the interweb for support and the mount can be controlled by a humble PC, which is exactly the plan, hence the lack of Goto. This saves me some £££ and forces me to know my way around the heavens a little more. The society has a nice looking Williams Optic triplet refractor I will haven't looked through, so will try and get it setup (with help!) on their NEQ6 tonight to get a feel for how it all works.

Still excited about all this and still confused. So much to learn. Excellent.