I've noticed the past few nights have been cold and clear, but it's been an exhausting week at work so decided to relax until the weekend, it was worth the wait.

Having failed to find these open clusters just to the left of Orion on a previous attempt due to the bright moon, I decided to postpone until the moon was out of the way. I'm still new to this whole moon thing as I wasn't expecting it to be out of the way so soon after a full moon, it didn't appear in the sky at all during my session tonight (which started at 6pm). According to Star Walk on the iPad it doesn't rise until 23:18 tonight.

Remembering the cluster's approximate positions since my last outing, I quickly located them in binoculars, then, to my surprise, found the first one in the finder scope too, despite the eyepiece frequently fogging up merely from my face being close to it - the temperature was very cold!

First up was M35, I located this by finding the three bright stars just up from Betelgeuse (later discovered to be Tejat Posterior, Propus, and Propus... according to Star Walk anyway).

OK, I had written a nice long blog post for this but very annoyingly I clicked something and it disappeared, never to be seen again. GRRRR!

Not typing all of that again now, it was probably a very boring read anyway. Cut a long story short I saw M35, M36, M37, and M38, there was a bit of a problem with dew and heat from my face fogging up the eyepiece, I had a great time until the battery started to fade, then I packed up. The end.