I decide to go to my folks house friday night as this is where my 10" flextube lives. It's a lot darker than my house and it's a good excuse ( not that we need one! )to have a few beers with the old man.

After collimating the primary which is a little way out from the factory ( I decide not to mess with the secondary on this occasion and just see how my primary tweeks have gone), and leaving the scope to cool down for probably not long enough,... I can wait no longer.

Newly acquired Baader Hyperion 17mm ep in I decide the first stop is Albireo in the constellation Cygnus.

I haven't yet fitted my rigel quick finder so it takes a few minutes wandering round until I come accross the pair.

Albireo looks a lovely warm yellow colour and b2 cygnus looks white....mmmm I'm pretty sure Albireo's partner in crime looked a little blue last time?.although it's ages since I first looked so I couldn't swear to it. Still the colour difference between them is very apparant and very beautiful.

My first impressions of my newly acquired Baader ep is that it's a lot better in this f5 scope than my others! stars are sharp across most of the FOV, which is huge compared to my other ep's, and the contrast is terrific.Although this was probably helped by my new light shrowd.

The sky around Cygnus and Lyra is very black tonight and is crammed with small groups of different coloured stars, strung out in loose chains,... or huddled together in small clusters.....twinkling multicoloured diamonds in the obsidian void....I can't help but grin,... from ear to ear....:D

while I'm in the neighbourhood I decide to drop in on an old friend.M57.( my first Messier)

A short while wandering around at the bottom of Lyra. small groups of stars huddled together ,some a warm yellowy colour and some a white to white blue colour ,wander in and out of the eyepiece... when a familiar smudge comes into view...there was M57.

Through the 17mm ep ,the ring nebula stands alone in the black,...surrounded by a necklace of stars strung out and around in an irregular circle...with the jewel in the middle......I look at m57 for quite a while..,I stare,I gaze , left eye , right eye blinking and using averted vision, flicking my eyes around the FOV trying to pick out all the detail. ...and I'm pretty sure I can discern a bit of colour in it tonight....an almost imperceptible duck egg blue shade to it.

I switch to my 7mm planetary ep not hoping for too much.....Indeed the field of view is dramatically reduced and everything looks a little dimmer, but m57 looks great....and very definately a bluish ( with maybe a hint of green ) colour.

After some minutes, and at first with averted vision only, I pick out m57's little companion star off to one side (not the middle one)....after a little more time I can see this star directly.

With averted vision, the neb has a very well defined donut shape, with some little degree of opaquness in the middle and extending outwards by a very small amount....with direct vision however it loses this donut shape and smears together somewhat.

It does still look blue though, and having never seen colour in it before now, I decide to question myself.

The best test , I decide , is to check against star colour.So I pan around some stars and finish up at Sulafat and Hip93017, (thank goodness for stellarium!), which is a beautifull warm yellow.

These two stars stand apart from the crowd.Sulafat ,which I learn is 5 times the size of our own sun, and in the process of turning into a diamond the size of earth. is a lovely blue colour. similar to vega in colour although not quite as bright!.

I switch back to the 17mm ep...yep...the colour difference is very apparent.

Black sky.Yellow Hip93017.blue Sulafat.....flicking my eyes over the sky once again, to and fro....yep M57 is no longer a faint fuzzie donut !...it's a faint duck egg blue ( with maybe a hint of green ) fuzzie donut !....I switch back to the 7mm ep and decide to do my first dso sketch ( which i'll put in my first SGL album!)...too many stars to sketch in the 17mm ep ! (maybe with a little more practice).

After this I move onto Jupiter which has risen suffficiently (not high enough for my liking tho! zenith would be great !).

Through the 17mm it looks great...well sometimes...when it's not just a fuzzie yellow ball due to atmosphere and maybe tube currents (10" mirror takes considerably longer to cool down than my 6")...Banding on the planet shows up very well, even at this mag.....

I try a 9mm,7mm and settle on my 26mm with 1a planetary visual filter and a 2xbarlow....somehow this combination works a treat...the amount of glass cuts down the brightness and it suffers no false colour at the edges....well not that i can discern anyway.

Four moons strung out at slight angles to each other and at times it looks like they're dancing to drum and bass....jiggling about frantically, I scan the planet and it's just a bright irregular blob one minute...and a crystal clear, sharp as a tak, gas giant the next.......eight ...maybe nine bands visible....is that a faint white band running through the largest pink band south of the eq?..(mental note to self. must learn jupiter and its bands/ areas!!).

It's been a few weeks since my last planetary 'fix' and I sit back and soak it up ....Jupiter is awsome !....yes i said it....awesome!.

I decide to sketch Jupiter and it's moons and to also include the little mag 9.35 star thats hanging out with them.(which will not be included in my album. the colours on jupiter cannot be seen on the photo i've taken ...must experiment with getting sketches onto SGL in a seeable way!).

Jupiter sketch turns out to be a lot harder than m57 as the colours i'm using don't show up that well in the red light....again more practice needed.

And that was about it for the night really,....I had a wander round and later took in the beautifull pleiades but the clear skies turned into patchy light cloud and soon it was totally clouded over, still a very very good night and at 2.45 am I called it a night......

Int' astronomy brilliant?....:D