After a looooong drought, last night was my first GNFA in months. All I can say is if all night were like last night, urban observing wouldn't have such a bad name. I observed from 8-9:35, and transparency was great. Seeing was at least average, if not a little better than average.
I started out with Jupiter, but due to tube currents, it wasn't much to see. At 120X, it was barely stable. I was able to see 4 belts, and there was a black spot on the NEB. Then it was on to some Messier objects. I logged M25 and then suddenly realized… Sagittarius?!? In October? Who knew? But sure enough, it was an easy spot, in spite of being well past the meridian. So I started hunting and quickly realized that I should be using my binoculars. I've been at 45 Binocular Messiers for practically a year, with the "easy" group missing a bunch in Sagittarius. I took a few minutes to locate M24, and then it was off to the races! M18, M17 and M16 all fit within my binocular FOV. M18 and M17 were small and diffuse, but M16 was very large and bright. I also logged M23, just to be sure (which makes my count 51 out of the required 50 for the patch!)
At this point, I knew it was a rare night, so I decided to check some old favorites. M2 was spectacular, and I took a few minutes to enjoy it. It is so dense, there's no hope of resolving to the core with my 10". I also checked on M15, which wasn't nearly as great, but even it was a showpiece at 200X. More stars resolved, but it also was too dense to get to the core with. Encouraged by those, I checked my H400 list. I hunted NGC6939, a nice open cluster in Cygnus. I also looked for NGC6946, but came up empty on that one. None of my charts provided enough guide stars to find the proper starfield (and there were so many stars around Cygnus that it was quite easy to become lost…) I finished the evening with NGC7006, a "faint fuzzy" in Delphinus.
In short, AGNFA.