I went to a star party to view mars but unfortunatley it was too cloudy! when we got home I looked up and it was clear! It was about 12:00 P.M. and I was tired but I decided to get the scope back out and see mars. It looked great. It was so bright in the sky. Mars looked A LOT bigger then last time. I have some images of it in astroimaging if you want to check those out. they are not very good and mars looks a lot better with more detail in the scope.
M57:M57 is in Lyra and and after 1 hour of looking in the wrong spot, I finally found it with ease. I was surprised at how easy it is to find when you look in the right spot! I could have almost missed it with the 25mm in. but it looks perfectly round and fainter than the surrounding stars. When I dropped in the 9mm I could see a greenish tint and when I used adverted vison I could see why it is called the ring nebula. Perfectly hollow. With the 6mm It rocked! It was bigger than I expected and Perfectly round with a greenish tint to it. I didn't even have to use adverted vision to see the ring shape with this Eyepiece. This object was great.
M29: This is an open cluster in Cygnus. Very easy to find and pretty neat. 7 bright stars shining nicely in an odd pattern.
The closehanger: I don't know if this qualifies as an open cluster but it does in my book. It looks so neat in the telescope. The baseline is perfectly straight.
Mars: Mars was once again very awesome. Orange and beautiful. I could see the land features and the polar ice cap.
Overall this was a great night out. I loved M57! _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________
The moon was great. I took some more pictures and I will soon have them updated onto my site. They are a lot better than the first ones.
Mars was awesome!! This is the first time I have ever got to see mars with my telescope. It was pretty small but had a lot of detail visible with my highest magnification. I was actually under estimating what it would look like this time. I saw the northern polar ice cap and some land features. They were black and on various parts of the planet. I could clearly see that it was Orange. I was very impressed with this planet.
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Jupiter, M104,M66,M65,Uknowon Virgo galaxy.
Jupiter: It was exqusit as always! 5 equitorial bands showing signs of swirvy curvy.... M104: This was so amazing my vision went blury! I have been searching forever to find this beauty... It was great and better than i expected! About 1 1/2 inches in diameter with the 6mm.the core was very bright and i could see the prominant dust lane right under the top core. talk about jaw dropping... M66: This was a fun brighter galaxy. i swore i saw some spiral structure... butSOME people refuse to believe me!(you know who you are) M65: very bright and nice. elongated fuzz. nothing too special..
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