Observing Log for Mike Durkin 6/30/2018 about 8:30PM-11:30PM Locust Valley, NY Transparency: 9/10, Seeing 3/5 Temperature: about 80-90 degrees Equipment: Celestron Ultima 8 with PEC After the failed attempt at the beach earlier this month, it has still been a long time since my last observing session. I looked up the times of the Great Red Spot times, and tonight was supposed to be a good shot of catching it shortly after sunset. After I was set up, I did see the Great Red Spot just after it transited Jupiter's meridian. I also saw Io just at the limb of the disk as it was going behind Jupiter. I used a couple of colored filters as well. The green filter did seem to be the best for seeing the GRS. After that I checked out a few globular clusters. M5 - I had to use the 7.4mm eyepiece before I was able to start resolving some stars. Palomar 5 - unable to see. NGC 5897 - I ight have glimpsed once or twice when sweeping by with the 7.4mm eyepiece. It was low to the horizon and the skybackground was bright. M12 M10 M14: seen with the 17mm eyepiece and a 2x barlow. Fairly large, but no distinct features. it only appeared slightly lighter than the background. Overall a pretty decent evening. Got back to some visual observing, although I wonder if my collimation was good enough. I just hope that I didn't aggrivate my tennis elbow a bit with lifting and moving stuff around since it was a little sore at times during the evening. 6/9/2018 about 7:30PM-10:00PM Jones Beach Nature Center, NY Transparency: 2/10, Seeing ?/5 Temperature: about 60-70 degrees Equipment: none It had been a while since my last observing session, so I went to an AOS observing session at Jones Beach. However the night was basically a bust, the was almost totally overcast. A couple of other members were there for the night, but we just hung aroud and worked a little bit on one of the smaller scopes in the storage room. Other Log Entries <-- 2017 Jan  Feb  Mar  Apr   May   Jun   Jul  Aug  Sep  Oct  Nov  Dec  2019 -->