I spent a few hours outside tonight with my 10″ Orion Dobsonian telescope hunting for celestial objects. These were all things I’ve seen before, but it was still really cool and very rewarding. I navigated with my iPad and used my wide-field Celestron binoculars to help me along. I fiddled with my iPhone and iPad camera a bit and produced these images. The software screenshot is from Starmap 2.
Here is my observing list for the evening:
- Tried to find planet Uranus and this was my only failed attempt of the evening.
- WZ Cassiopeia – Carbon star in Cassiopeia near the star Caph
- The Owl cluster (aka E.T. cluster) in Cassiopeia
- M103 – open cluster in Cassiopeia
- NGC 663 – open cluster in Cassiopeia
- M45- The Pleiades – Open cluster in Taurus
- The Hyades – cluster in Taurus
- M36 – Open cluster in Auriga
- M37 – Open cluster in Auriga
- M38 – Open cluster in Auriga
- M42 and trapezium cluster – nebula and open cluster in Orion
- R Leporis – carbon star in Lepus
It was a nice cool evening. The wind was brisk. This made the seeing pretty bad. But the transparency was excellent. And the lack of a bright moon helped a lot.
