A less-than-hopeful gaze out the kitchen window at about 7.30pm this evening revealed the unimaginable - an unforeseen clear night! Not to be sniffed at, as you know. So out I went - initially just to take in the naked eye view, which was good fun in itself and something I don't do enough of, actually. Testing myself to see how many constellations I could confidently identify was a decent challenge - and I'm still a bit hazy on some parts of the sky, particularly the obscure bits around the Pole (Camelopardalis, anyone??)

Anyway, I soon succumbed to the lure of aperture, and out came the 10" Dob. Conscious that time was almost certainly limited, I decided to go for just two targets - M1 (the Crab Nebula) in Taurus, and NGC 2392 in Gemini - the Eskimo Nebula.

After a bit of messing around trying to locate M1 (schoolboy errors like lining the Telrad up on the wrong star, etc) I found it. Quite a conspicuous patch of light at x50, and the view caused me to reflect on previous failed attempts to ever see M1 through smaller instruments. Aperture counts! A nice object, this - averted vision hints at some faint structure in the smudge, and it's clearly oblong rather than circular. A good one to notch up on a less than perfect evening, conditions-wise.

Next to Gemini, and the Eskimo Nebula - a really fantastic object, I recommend taking a look at this if you haven't before. It's amazingly bright and large for a planetary nebula, and at x171 the greenish circular halo around the central bright core is quite spectacular. With averted vision, I was pretty sure I could see two areas of brightness in the centre of the disk - I guess this is partly where the name comes from (a couple of eyes peeping out from an Eskimo hood...!)

As predicted, the cloud returned after about an hour of observing, so that was that again. A great little session though, and for me this highlights one of the massive advantages of a Dobsonian - 10" of telescope, set up and observing within 5 minutes of getting it out of the garage. In the UK, that's what you need!