Day 3 of minimal sleep due to child with cough. Hey ho...

Set up and cooled for 2215 and had a quick peek at Jupiter and Saturn. Very mushy at the 6mm (200 odd) setting that did so well the night before. Decided to come back later and see if it had improved.

Hopped from Enif to M2 and this confirmed that the seeing was far worse than last night - couldn't really resolve any stars. Let's do a couple of doubles!

Struve 2848 in Pegasus:

Wide separation, split at 53x. Yellow/blue starts of similar brightness. 

Tried to hop to Struve 2786 but overhanging branches were obscuring too many key navigation points, plus sky glow from London was obscuring key constellations to the naked eye. Frustrating!

Moved to Altair (I could see this one as not over London!) to use as a starting point. It was a ball of angry fuzz at higher mags - no airy disk. 

H N 84:

Orange/yellow primary with dimmer and very blue companion. very pretty! Wide split.

Decided to stay in this area of sky therefore observed the Coathanger nebula - it was obvious in the finder but underwhelming at 53x - it didn't fit in the view.  Like the Pleiades, another open cluster best suited to the ST80. I need to make a list of those and have a session with it at some point.

Got lost on the way to Anser (Alpha Vulpeculae) and then spotted Albireo in the finder so stopped there for a while...

M56:

Small glob. Could just resolve some stars on the edges. The sky seemed quite bright or milky and the glob quite dim so upping the magnification didn't seem to increase the contrast as much as usual  - the glob and the sky both dimmed!

Dumbbell Nebula:

Finally found it - was looking last night. Much bigger than expected but quite faint against the milky sky. Swapped out zoom for the UFF to see if I got more contrast. Not really but it did look perceptibly blue at lower magnifications. Maybe my imagination, don't know.  It looked more "coke can" than "dumbbell" - like a rectangle in a faint circle as per poor sketch:

M71: "Coarse" globular cluster. Quite big with readily resolvable stars. Took magnification well - far better than M56.

Last look at Jupiter - still really fuzzy so packed up at 12:07.