Sweet spot .

[cotterless45]

Wow ! Actual star popping darkness !

Saturn was just spectacular, shot up to x320 . Enjoyed super stable x160 views before putting the ancient 7.5mm Ultima into an ancient x2 Vixen Triplet Barlow. Ouch , the view was stable and completely mesmerising. The pole was darkened with a broad dark band across the disc, almost granular ! There was a clear Cassini all the way round with a dark outer zone. Remembered other things to explore.

The Comet C/21P Giacobini-Zinner looked very fine with a core in Cassiopeia. Just lovely to start focussing and catch this . In visitor comparison , Vesta looked stunningly bright low in Ophiuchus. The seeing was super steady and picking up just a few targets, I had great expectations of Mars. It boiled and bubbled like caramel in a hot pan. I could make out an ice cap at the top of the view with some dark area beneath it. About the same level of boil on Jupiter , missing the multiple event , but catching Io popping out .

A lovely Lambda Cygni at .9", caught at x320. I drew the wide field first , eyes get worked and relaxed with a bit of scrawling. Onto ΟΣ410 in Cygnus and the different in magnitudes popped out easily at .9". I checked these against an earlier .8" separation in a Cepheus triple. 

Then surfed around , starting with the Cygnus star cloud, M34,M39, "Bode's",M27 and the brightest part of the Eastern Veil NGC 6692. Here it was easy to trace around the lightly glowing arc. 

Well pleased , previously spent some time cleaning and setting the optics. I found four alignment marks and a date (31/1/11) on the side of the doublet. It's a big bit of glass taking delicate paws to handle.I also vacuumed out the diagonal. How does so much muck end up in there ?! Cheshire checked collimation , star test and way to go !

More clear skies coming with "fine weather high cloud" after midnight. The season's kicking off with 

Clear skies ! Nick.

[wookie1965]

Lovely drawings Nick I was still up at 2am in pain looked out Mars was blazing away but everywhere else was cloud and within a couple of minutes Mars had gone as well.

[John]

Great report Nick

You have a peach of a C6R there - the ones that I've owned (3 over the years) struggled to get much beyond 200x on anything. Until I added a Chromacor which tightened them up considerably. Good to see that 2011 was a good year for the Synta achromat