I had a spare battery in my pocket - not needed! Took the A77 and 70-400mm out for some more tests of sharpness after micro focus adjustment. Conclusion is that I'm very happy, under better conditions I'm seeing what I expected to see from this lens despite the lenshood causing so much buffeting from the wind I could hardly keep a stable view even with a monopod.
Later in the day, saw what was happening with sunset, rapidly diverted to Scott's View of the Eildons - aware that another car was chasing hard on my tail. I pulled in, jumped out, grabbed the camera with 16-50mm and took a dozen exposures rapidly without any tripod or monopod, no filters, no messing - I know only too well that when the sunset looks like this, you can have ten seconds to get the shot. Even the next frame of the sky was not as good.
Two guys in combat jackets with large Nikons jumped out of the other car, opened the back, wrestled out tripods. I had finished shooting by the time No 1 had got himself stuck in a kissing-gate because he chose to open his tripod first, then get over the wall (there is nothing better OVER the wall than you get from shooting behind it!). Not even with the camera mounted. I had driven off by the time No 2 had finished finding his lens.
It's a composite of two exposures and two different raw developments, hand-held, but Photoshop is dead easy to 'snap to'. I settled on a final size image 5120 pixels wide to reduce the noise created by some rather extreme contrast/brightness manipulation of the foreground exposure.

- eildonwintersunsetcomp-web.jpg (142.78 KiB) Viewed 5374 times
I have many shots of this view of course, their merits entirely depend on the sun position and weather.
David