Arcturus D

The object is naked eye detectable under dark skys. Holding an UHC filter in front of the naked eye also greatly helps.

Splitting Izar is weather dependent. On good nights I can do it at 133x with an 8" Dobsonian. I tried it the other night and I had to use about 192x to get a clean split.

You will have to travel to very dark skies and probably use a filter

I used to spend hours planning sessions. I now just create observing lists in Sky Safari and my observing productivity has gone up by a factor of 5.

Excellent collimation is needed for objects like the planets in order to increase contrast. For most DSOs you can get away with a rough collimation.

The planets are low at the moment, but still high enough to see a lot of detail on good nights. I have had some of my best viewings of Jupiter over the last few weeks.

A 114mm can go up to 200x on a good day. Saturn can take 200x, for Jupiter it is often too much. Steady nights where the "seeing" is good are critical if you want to see the Cassini Division with your small scope. Bright planets, such as Saturn and Jupiter, can also be viewed in the twilight. As ones eyes are not fully dark adapted in the twilight, it is often easier to spot colours in the planets, due to the eye still using its cones rather than going exclusively to rods.

This also means that the PSA Pocket Sky Atlas is useful if one is browsing the sky with a finderscope, typically 8x50 or 9x50.

I have found that using the PSA Pocket Sky Atlas usually matches up well with what I can see with a pair of 10 x 50 binoculars, which is around mag 9.0.