So, last night was a rare event, and holy shit we got clear skies. Two moons, Io and Europa would cross the face of Jupiter, followed by their shadows visible on the planet. Then, about 1/2 way through the event, the Great Red Spot would show up and join the party. This happens once a year or so, but damn if I was going to miss this one with good skies and feeling somewhat healthy. Then, fuck happened. My laptop is dead after struggling all night. The telescope that I used? I had not used it in a while and this is the conversation we had. Telescope: Hey, remember about six months ago when you were complaining that the focuser was not working right and you should really get on fixing that? Me: no, sorry, don't remember that... Telescope: THINK FAST, MOTHER FUCKER! Fortunately I caught the camera, prism and $300 Barlow lens before they hit the ground. That took an hour to fix. Then the Camera had issues, I think this was due to the laptop failing to provide power to the USB ports. Then the god damned mount did a meridian flip on me when everything was starting to work and I could never get the mount working right again. Oh, on an equatorial mounted telescope, eventually the telescope will track to due south and have to "flip" to the other side of the north-south axis else your gear will impact the legs of the tripod. Normally this is a trivial maneuver. Not this time. I ended up grabbing the Craigslist rescue scope and getting that image, the only good data I got all night while freezing in the wind chill of about 20F. If you blow that tiny dot up, you can make out an off color smudge that is the two moons, a darkened smudge in the middle of the disk that is the two shadows, and the Great Red Spot itself. This is about what Jupiter will look like to the human eye in the eyepiece. For being the king of the planets, it is very far away and very small in the telescope. I did get to witness the event without the camera, so I get to chalk that one on the list of neat things to talk about, and today I think I figured out what the hell the mount did. And I dropped $1300 on a laptop, which I did not want to do at all, but the old one is in pieces and is not going to ever work again (motherboard fried). The Laptop was a $150 refurb Thinkpad T61, I put a $50 SSD in it and it ran like a trooper for four years so I am not too upset. One of these months I am going to force myself to sit down and get good at the picture stuff. but for now this is about what I can do.