Suggestions for things to look at

[richmace]

Bearing in mind that I have a very basic telescope (refracter, 50mm aperture, 600mm focal length), anybody have any suggestions for objects that I can look for?

I have been learning the constellations and major stars for the last few months with my 10x50 binoculars, and found the following objects:

Moon - obviously

Orion Nebula

Maia Nebula

With my telescope, I have seen the following planets:

Venus

Saturn

My targets in the next couple of weeks:

Jupiter - I am hoping to get up early tomorrow to try for Jupiter (it was cloudy in the south at 5am today).

Moon - can't wait for it to appear on the 18th. The Moon will suck up a lot of my time

To become more familar with my telescope and improve my fine adjustment skills.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.....

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Maia nebula? Never heard of it. Grab a look at M13, that's always good value.

Captain Chaos

[Whippy]

Maia nebula? Never heard of it. Grab a look at M13, that's always good value.

Captain Chaos

I noticed the Maia Nebula when I was having a play with Stellarium. It's the pleades. Wierdly when I actually looked for M45, it didn't find it...

[Astronut]

The double cluster in Perseus has always been a favourite.

[GazOC]

Its the nebulosty we see near the Pleadies not the Pleadies themselves, I only mention it because the jury is still out on whether the nebulosity is associated with the cluster or just a line of sight effect.

[SteelRat]

If yer gonna be looking at Jupiter - look up and to the east and look for m27 (the dumbell neb). Can make it out in 10x50 bins so you should be ok with y'scope. Further up you got the Ring neb - midway between the bottom two stars of the constellation Lyra . Let us know how you get on with that one, should be quite faint.

[lunator]

iota cancri

A double star blue/yellow in Cancer.

Should be ideal for your scope.

Cheers

Ian

[Cloudgazer]

If you're getting up early to look at Jupiter then you could have a look at Albireo (yellow / blue double star at the end of the constellation Cygnus) as it's about at the same time and well worth looking at.

Scott

[richmace]

Thanks for all the suggestions, I've created a list and I'll work through them as quickly as I can (assuming I can find them all, of course).

Regarding the Maia Nebula, you're all quite right - it's the star cluster I see, not the nebula. I'll correctly call it Pleiades from now on

I successfully managed to get a view of saturn using the highest magnification available to me: (x300 - 6mm lens, 3x Barlow lens). I was unable to achieve focus and the image was quite pale (compared to the x100 image) which is probably not surprising as I was pushing the scope way past it's usable range. So the exercise turned out to be a test of my ability rather than anything useful.