Observing Log for Mike Durkin 12/7/2002 9:00 PM -12:00 AM Oyster Bay, about 30 degrees Transparency 9/10, seeing: 6/10 Ultima 8 PEC First set the scope on Saturn. The image wasn't as clear as I have seen from this site in the past. The air did not seem particularly steady tonight. Some Dave and Alice's neighbors wanted to know what I was looking at, so I showed them Saturn with the 17mm eyepiece, and they seemed impressed. A little later on, the air seemed to get a little better for Saturn, but still not quite as good as before. Observerd M35 in Gemini. Looked nice in the scope with the 30mm eyepiece and filled the field of view. Observed M36, M37, and M38 in Auriga, all at 30mm. First saw M37, which looked nice at 30mm. Then M36, which looked brighter and smaller than M37. I had a hard time finding M38 since I could not see it in the finderscope. When I did find M38, it was larger and didn't have as many bright stars as M36. In my opinion the best looking open cluster in Auriga. Observed M42 and M43 in Orion. After waiting for a bit for my eyes to adjust I was able to see a litle more of the extended part of the nebula on M42. Although I could make out some of the nebula of M43 around the star, I probably wouldn't really pick it out as a separate nebula from M42. Using the Orion Ultrablock Narrowband filter did bring out a little more detail in the extended parts of the nebula, although didn't help much with M43. Tried to observe M78 in Orion, however I was not able to, even with star hopping. I wasn't really sure what it was going to look like, and I may have passed over it. Also observed Jupiter. At first the seeing was very bad since it was low on the horizon. By about 11:00 PM or so, it was a little better. When I first observed Jupiter there were three moons to the right of it in my field of view. One was touching the edge of the disk of Jupiter. Withing a matter of an hour or so, it was easy to see that it had moved quite a bit. Based on Sky and Telescope December issue, this moon is Ganymede right after it was occulted by Jupiter. 12/1/2002 9:00-11:00 PM Rego Park, about 30 degrees 6" Newtonian, 10x50 binoculars First time I went to observe on Julian's roof.  Nice view of the horizon in all directions, but the light pollution washes a lot out, especially anything about 30 degrees above the horizon. We tried to find a couple of cluster in Auriga.  At the beginning of the evening I couldn't find any in by binoculars, but at the end I was able to make out M36 before we left.  It appeared as a faint gray smudge. No detail observed. We also looked at M42 in Julian's scope.  It looked very nice.  He also had the Orion Ultrablock filter, and that did make a difference at higher powers.  I was able to see further out of the nebula with the filter. We also observed M31 and M32 in Andromeda in Julian's scope.  After focusing, I pointed out that one of the stars in the field of view appeared "fuzzy" and was M32.  Julian had never noticed that before, and we verified it was M32 afterwards. Also looked at a quadruple system in Orion, but I forget which star it was. Looked at saturn at 200-300x power.  When it wasn't windy, it was a nice view.  Could see the Cassini division and a couple of the moons. Also tried to look at Jupiter before we left.  The seeing for Jupiter was terrible, probably a combination of the fact that it was low in the horizon and it was above 3 apartment buildings.