[shelly]

Hi,

I hope this is in the right place, I thought I might share my very amateur observing session from last night.

We decided to go camping for the night out at a friends farm. It is usually very dark and has nothing obscuring most of the nights sky with the exception of a few trees. Although, last night there was alot of smoke haze from burning off and clouds, lots of clouds.

About 7pm the clouds started lifting and the smoke haze seemed to have gone so I set up and started with the moon.

I love looking at the moon and this was the first time I was looking for actual features. Having a simple map of major features of the moon was very helpful and made looking at it all the more interesting.

I switched to Jupiter. Jupiter appeared whitish with two darker brown bands (no detail just two darker lines). I hadn't seen those bands so clearly before. Only three moons visible at the time.

The clouds started coming back over.

I turned to Saturn, I thought I might sit and watch it for a while and see if I could make out any detail but the clouds defeated that idea.

I really wanted to look for objects i hadn't seen before but in the end I think there was about 45mins of clear skies....

The highlight was an exclamation by a young boy who hadn't seen Saturn before, he said "WOW" .

I have downloaded an Observing Log template from here - is there any point in filling this sort of thing in for an absolute beginner. I would like to keep a record of what I have seen, so are diary entries such as the above sufficient? Is there any other information that would make it more useful if I was to look back over it? What do you think?

Thanks.