Re: Observing tonight?

I went out last night as well. I was at Keller at about 9:30. I also tried to find Comets Cardinal and Yi-SWAN. I didn't find either. I did however find a fuzzy patch near M38, but after adding more magnification, it turned out to be a cluster. I drew the field to identify it later. It turned out to be NGC 1907. Then I remembered reading about a supernova in galaxy NGC 4088. I pointed my scope in the general direction, and quicly came up on a galaxy. It did seem bright, but adding more power didn't seem to help. Since there were several galaxies in that direction, and I didn't have anything more detailed than the PSA, I decided to draw that starfield too. That definitely did turn out to be NGC 4088. I can't say I positively saw the supernova, though. I will come back to it, now that I know. Next I  took a stab at M101, which I had trouble with at Keller in the past. It was fairly high up in the sky, and what do you know, I found it! It was still very faint, with just the core, but it was there. Later I looked at the Virgo cluster. I found the face that begin's Markarian's chain, and was able to follow that chain. Since the galaxies were showing some extension, and not just a core, I took a stab at them with my Oberwork 15×70's. I'm glad I did. It wasn't nearly as easy as with my scope, but I did find M59, M60, M87, M84 and M86. Much harder than in the scope, but all right there.  Then I looked at M3, which showed some resolution, near the edges at 120x even, and at 240x, quite a bit more. At that point it was getting very late, and a bit cold, especially compared to the day, so I headed home.
A great night for astronomy!