Hello astronomy fans! I got out tonight for four and a half hours. I had hoped for the sky to really give me a chance to make some major progress, but two things happened. One really good and one not so good.
The first good thing that happened was that the two folks that I knew that lived further back on the road stopped by and they had a good long look through the telescope and binoculars at what I call "the obvious stuff". We looked at Saturn, Mars, M44 (the Beehive Cluster), Gamma Leonis, Polaris, M13 the great globular in Hercules, and the galaxies M81/M82. Bruce and Betty Bergsgaard really liked everything they saw. They have a little telescope, but I think there's a chance that they might get more interested now. They have an invite to the Star B-Q.
After they left, I started to make some progress. I bagged NGC 5466, a globular in Bootes (way cool, but faint. It's BIG! a spooky looking object in my 8" SCT). I also bagged NGC's 5373 & 5374 in Ursa Major. These are outlying companion galaxies to M101. All are Herschel 400 objects.
Then the clouds started to roll in on me. High thin ones that robbed me of magnitudes, layer by layer. I had one hole of clear sky that I went to to nab NGC 7160, an open cluster in Cepheus for my Binocular Deep Sky list. Then that was about it.
I wanted to stay at it until the Moon rose at 3:30 a.m, but not even Jupiter or Antares was showing on the southern horizon, and only Arcturus, and the Summer Triangle could be seen near the zenith. I don't think I'll be able to finish my Lunar 100 until July now.
Oh well. Astronomy teaches us to be patient. It was still a glorious night for astronomy.