A crisp clear Sunday night 😊

[lunator]

I had been watching the weather forecast for Sunday night. It looked promising and amazingly as darkness fell the sky stayed clear. The wind was a rather chilly northerly but this hopefully meant good seeing and transparency.

My first target was Jupiter there were still a few tube currents but the view was fairly good. With several bands visible some nice detail. 

I decided to move onto Epilson Aries (A close pair, at 1.3~1.4”) I was pleased to be able to split it at x150. This gave me confidence that the seeing was pretty good. 

As it was close by I thought I would stop by Uranus. A pale grey/green disc at x150. 

As the transparency was good I thought I would have a try for M33. I have never seen it from my various home locations, but being in bottle 4 area and the clear sky I thought it would be worth a shot. To my pleasant surprise I located it and a clear glow in the eyepiece was apparent. Didn’t see much detail but pleased to have achieved the observation. I will return to M33. 

A had few doubles on my list and the first one on the list was STF76 a fairly close pair of white and blue/grey. 
The next double was STF89 a fairly wide pair so nice and easy.
I moved onto my next double STF96 it is a  very close pair that took x200 to split.

My next target was STF109. A fairly close pair but splittable at x50. The primary being white and the secondary being pale blue. 

By now Orion was clearing the houses and as the seeing was pretty good I thought I would try for the E&F components. At x200 they were quite clear to see. It is the first time I have seen the F component clearly. The nebula itself was showing superb detail. 

I moved briefly onto M37 and to M35 and to my surprise NGC2158 and IC2157 were also clearly visible.

My final 2 targets were
STF115 and STF116
On the way there I stopped off at the Owl Cluster. If you squint and use your imagination you see to bright ‘eyes’ and the ‘wings’ made of trails of Stars.
STF115 AB is a very tight pair not clearly split at x300. The secondary was illusive.
STF116 is a much wider pair of yellow and blue. 

All in all a very good session with some nice firsts

Cheers

Ian 
 

[F15Rules]

Nice report Ian..

What scope(s) were you using for the session?

Dave

[mikeDnight]

On 10/01/2024 at 17:23, F15Rules said:

Nice report Ian..

What scope(s) were you using for the session?

Dave

A tele-scope! 😁