My pleasure John
.
I can't recall what Mars looked like in my smaller scopes but you should be able to make out a reddish disk and perhaps some dark shading. You mentioned earlier that you see it as a bright red star... it shouldn't resemble a star (point of light), but more disk like
. I hope you're not confusing it with the bright red star, Antares in Scorpius
. Mars rises around 9pm at the moment. But there's a large dust storm happening at the moment and it may even go global, so I'm really not sure what view you'll get at the moment. You picked a good time to get a scope because Mars is heading for opposition on July 27th, then August 1st it'll be closest to Earth. It will be the biggest and brightest since 2003, and not get this close to us again until 2035.
If you head over to our facebook page, you'll see a pic I posted this evening showing the dust storm and a comparison view without.
Regarding the 15mm eyepiece, yes, get one despite having the 10mm and 25mm. Across my 4", 6" and 10" scopes, it's been a hard worker on all of them. I haven't tried out a Skywatcher eyepiece but the specs look good and the price is reasonable.
When selecting objects, select ones to about magnitude +6 or +7 and I think you'll have a good chance of nabbing them. Can try +8 as well. Lots in Scorpius and Sagittarius you can get incl. M22, M17, M7 & M7.
Oh and I forgot to mention earlier, The Tarantula nebula in the LMC- you'll see that also.
Here's one of the articles I did, you should be able to get lots on here, but maybe not the galaxies (have a go anyway). Don't observe when the Moon is out, it'll dim down those faint fuzzies. Planetary viewing is no problem.
Highlights of the Winter Sky
And I did a search for some of my obs, here's the link for the search results:
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...archid=4347831