[orestis]

Hi everyone,

Its been a long time since I have done any deep sky observing because of the Moon.This time though the moon was rising a little bit later on both evenings.

Monday night it was clear and I decided to do some observing.The telescope used was as usual my 130mm reflector with various eps.Conditions were clear so good transparency and quite good seeing.This also gave me a chance to observe the Grus quartet from the October obs challenge.

Jupiter- Jupiter like a beacon in the sky was like a magnet and as usual ended being the first thing I observed.I could see considerable detail on jupiter with band variations with darkening at the pole and a hint of wiggliness in the NEB.One thing i really enjoyed about jupiter was not actually jupiter itself but its moons it was the first time I noticed the satellites as discs and at 300x they looked awesome with me being able to discern different apparent sizes and colors which was lots of fun.

Grus quartet-After a bit of searching around i noticed a grouping of faint like wisps of light. after a while i was able to discern all 4.In the close grouping of the 3 ,2 where elongated and the third circular.the one furthest out and next to a bright star was one of my favorites being reasonably bright and elongated .This reminded me of my great time observing the leo triplet and I enjoyed this cluster very much.

M15-I couldn't believe my eyes when I had successfully observed m15 with my naked eye clearly.It being mag 6.Using my new 9mm Tmb (100x) on M15 it looked absolutely amazing being almost completely resolved.(ON the 26th i did a sketch of this glob(attached) aswell as seeing some old faves.)

47tuc-Since m15 was so good I decided to have a go at 47 tucanae.It was simply awesome showing much the same detail of m15 just bigger and dare i say better than omega centauri.It was very well framed at 100x mag in the 9mm.

I had 2 awesome nights of viewing,
hope you like my sketch
cheers orestis