I went out for an hour tonight, and was well rewarded. At 9:00pm it is finally dark, but the moon rises close to 10 so I didn’t have much time for DSO’s. Transparency was poor, but seeing was good. I had four objects on my list tonight. I ended up getting distracted and only observing two of them, while adding another to the list. I was going to go for M75 and the Saturn Nebula, but I got sidetracked in the Summer Triangle. I planned on observing the Ring Nebula, but the Double Double, a four star system, caught my attention. It is in the constellation Lyra, near Vega. There are two stars close to each other, each with a companion with separations of 2.3 and 2.8 arc seconds. I was able to barely split these four stars at 150x, and I was excited. By the time I was ready to continue to the list, M75 and the Saturn Nebula were too low in the skyglow. The last two objects were M2 and Jupiter. I easily found and observed M2, and then moved on to Jupiter. It is still low in the East, but seeing was good and I was impressed with the view. The GRS was just coming around the limb of the planet. I was able to see Io, Callisto, and Ganymede. Europa was behind the planet. I need a high powered eyepiece. I spent the last 20 minutes taking some wide-field shots of Jupiter, the Pleiades, Cassiopeia, and the Summer Triangle. Nothing new tonight except the Double Double binary star system, but it was a fun night of observing.
Here's some of the wide-field images from tonight. All of them were 10 second exposures, ISO 400.
Pleiades
Jupiter and Aldebaran between the tree
Summer Triangle
Cassiopeia
Airplane streaks
