I spent about an hour this morning working with one of the astronomy professors taking apart the telescope so that we could clean the mirror. When we got the tube off and could actually look at the primary mirror, it became obvious that cleaning dust off of the mirror was not really going to help. The mirror coating has degraded down to about less than 50% reflectivity. Staring at the mirror was like seeing your reflection in a cookie sheet. Yeah, there was a reflection, but it was really faint. I'm suprised that the scope works at all.