Hi,
Being a newcomer to astronomy, I'm still learning my way around the night sky, and only have a fairly narrow patch of sky to work with in my yard in urban Sydney...I'm learning to recognise Crux, Centaurus, Scorpius, Saggitarius...I'm still taking baby steps here, but thought I'd post a quick observation report anyway....
A quick rundown of tonight, from sunset to around 9.30, with breaks for cloud to move away:
Jewell Box, Omega Centauri, on to a run of M's....M4, M80, M20, M21, M54, then tried for C6729, but I'm not sure about this one, I found something in the area but I wasn't 100% I got what I was hunting...I also got a chance to start identifying stars in Grus..
When the clouds weren't around, I thought the seeing was pretty good, and I was able to see some beautiful detail in M20/21. It did seem to me that some of the fainter clusters were harder to make out than on other nights, but this could be my inexperience...
I was happy to see in Astronomy 2010 that there was a bit of action with Jupiter, and I was hoping to see a shadow transit of Io, as well as the GRS....when I first saw Jupiter, around 9.00, it was still fairly low in the sky, and the image was shimmering quite a lot even at 80x. I could see one band clearly, as well as three moons. Seeing stayed like this until around 20 min later, when all of a sudden things cleared and at 120x I could see the GRS and the shadow of Io, and everything was clear and sharp. It was really beautiful, and after checking this out for a minute I pushed it to 160x, but this was not good, so went back to 120x and had another minute or two until the clouds moved in again, this time heavier and with a more determined attitude, so I decided to pull the pin...
So, some nice M hunting, and a few minutes of clear Jupiter. A great, if short, evening's observing....
.
!!
