Had my first serious night out with my scope last night for quite a while, got home from work and went out about 12.30am(I work stupid hours) went straight to M42 as I always do to make sure everything's working fine.
All is good so started to have a look around, now I get pretty bad LP from the Steelworks especially in the South East part of the sky and the West from streetlights, but tonight, because the everything had moved across the sky I got a simply stunning view (to this newb anyway) of the milky way which is now almost directly above me and not suffering as badly from the damn steelworks.
Any way to cut a long story short I spent a good hour just slowly moving my scope through the MW and all the fantastic clusters, I couldn't believe how many they were. also stopping for ages on Eta Carinae, the first time I'd got a really good look at it, before heading over to Omega Centauri which I'd only barely seen before due to LP,totally spectacular !
Next was Saturn, using my 5x Powermate I got incredible views, though obviously with a small FOV so continually adjusting my scope and although I've seen Saturn several times before it still has that WOW factor and I'm sure it always will.
Now just got to get to some real dark skies for some even better viewing. Any ideas for around the Wollongong region? I was thinking the southern tablelands but have no real idea where to look for a good site.
Didn't mean to ramble on this much but last night was just so good and so much fun,I had to let every one know what a blast I had, probably going to do it all over again tonight
.
Cheers
Steve