Just thought I'd share my recent observing session.
It was a bit of a last minute decision but had my gear set up in the backyard by 8.30pm local time and had things aligned and tracking by 9pm. I chose 4 targets that were not hard but I had never seen.
Having recently read about observing Uranus and seen Phils’ pics of the planet I thought I'd start there. Without goto this would've been tricky for me to find. After punching it in and the scope finished slewing I looked in the eyepiece and didn't see what I was expecting. Looking through the finder I noticed a starlike suspect about half a degree away. I moved the scope to it, looking through a 15mm eyepiece and there it was. At 210x the view was pretty good. On the small side but great colour. Mostly a greenish colour but on the left - not sure about east or west - the colour darkened to a bluish shade. I tried higher and lower powers but the 15mm gave a good balance between image size and resolution.
Next target was NGC253. I've only seen a few galaxies from my very light polluted backyard. They are hard to find and usually disappointing. This was a different story. What I wasn't prepared for was how big it is, extending outside the field of view of my 40mm plossl. I describe my observing style as freestyle where I look at wherever my mind or eyes take me so I wasn't prepared to bring out my wide angle eyepieces. It's like someone airbrushed a big swathe of sky. I did notice a gradual but definite brightening towards the core.
The big glob NGC104 was my next victim. I'd observed this with my binoculars but never telescopically. WOW. Started with the 40mm and it was just a massive ball of stars, slightly elongated rather than round. It just gets brighter and brighter towards the core with great intensity in the central 30%. Even in the core I was getting good star resolution so I decided to probe with the 15mm and wasn't disappointed. This is a target I'll be coming back to for a lot of further investigation.
Lastly I thought I'd thought I'd have a quick look at an old friend Orion. The trapezium region in particular. With my 15mm again the E and F components were easy to see and the whole area was surrounded by this beautiful dark and light streaky wisps of gas and dust. The view was nice and sharp and reminded me of some of the best images of this nebula.
This concluded what was one of my most memorable observing sessions. I saw 3 great targets for the first time that I'll definitely come back to and 1 friend I got to know a bit better.
Thanks for reading.