NGC 40 and super seeing.

[cotterless45]

Set up at 8.30. No dew and clear skies kept me going until 1.30, hurrah !

Kicked off with C/2014 E3 Jacques. This has moved brightly and speedily into Cepheus. Just a lovely bright core with a surrounding glow in the star fields.

Then onto NGC 40 , the "Bow Tie" planetary nebula. Really strange looking one, able to get up to x216 and see the detail of the core and halo.

NGC 7217 showed a bright galaxy in Pegasus at x100.

NGC 6940 is a lovely sparkly open cluster in Vulpecula, well worth finding. Then went back to Cepheus for

NGC 6939, a superb open cluster with a dense star cloud.

I had a look at the lovely M56 ,an overlooked globular cluster in Lyra.

I noticed that Aquarius was reasonable in the bright south and had a look at some lovely doubles there. Including the lovely

zeta Aquarii binary oranges at x200 and the delicate triple Σ2944. No signs of the Messiers as the view south is blocked by a large tree,

Some wee sketches and a memory of a super seeing night,

Clear skies !

Nick.

[kerrylewis]

Nice report Nick. You were fortunate. The consensus of the various forecasts for my location was that it would be clear all night . Beautiful pristine sky at around 8.00pm so I set up and watched the first stars, Vega, Arcturus etc start to appear.....and then: in rolled the big dark grey showstoppers. In fact I feared that we would get a shower so I quickly covered everything up. Having retreated to bed I got up again just after midnight and it was still 90% cloud. I think it might have cleared later but only as the skies began to brighten.

I find lately, more than usual, the weather seems difficult to predict. Ah well, the joys of this wonderful hobby!

[Scooot]

Thanks nick,

I've added some of those clusters to my next target list -