Another sweet as report Les! Your obs of NGC 5291 caught my eye, I have observed this pair myself.
My obs from way back in 2008 with a 10" dob.
NGC 5291
Forms part of the "Seashell" galaxy pair. Now, once again, my sighting of IC879 is re-inforced here. This galaxy has a listed mag of 14.2, with an equally feeble SFC brightness of 13.9, which by all means should not have been visible with a 10" from my suburban sky. When, after careful observation, the galaxy manifested itself in my 192x eyepiece, I could barely believe it I increased the mag to 250x, despite the shocking seeing. This cluster of galaxies was riding the zenith so I had the best seats in da house. Stuff me, at 250x I could not only see the galaxy, which is only 0.3 mags off the theoretical limit of a 10", but I did make out a N-S elongation. Turning to the MSA, the symbol is indeed orientated in a N-S angle!
I should revisit this object, and well the entire cluster from my new location.
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Originally Posted by ngcles
One of the (many) nice things about living in a virtually pristine deep-sky site is that you have no real time-pressure to finish up an object (s) and move on, there's always another night.
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You said it! Having suffered Melbourne's craptacular climate for 2 decades with its endless barrage of cloud and other nuisances, I now feel bloody spoilt. There are so many clear nights here I don't have to worry about missing a night, because the next one will be clear anyway, and my dark site is only a 15-20 minutes drive away.
That being said, this new moon period is largely a write off, very hot and humid conditions with cloud. Hottest and cloudiest spell since I moved here !!! I did experience a few light showers with massive drops, enough to wet the ground, from high-based cells last month with a concurrent temp of 41.8C on my weather station!