During the summer, we gathered quite late to observe the night sky, around 11 pm to be specific. Today, at 8pm we were up and ready. It had got dark very soon so we decided to put up the equipment ASAP. We even got lucky - half of the town was dark beacuse the street lights were off. Clear sky + no Moon = One hell of a night for ANONYMUS.

      After putting up our Celestron C8 (done by Gogo), we got right on it. First, the classic. The Andromeda galaxy (M31), eastern sky. Great for observing with binoculars, and especially with a powerful telescope like our own. After that, a glance at an open cluster filled with milions of stars, in Hercules - M13. In our opinion, the best heavenly object to see through our telescope.

    Just because we have a GOTO guide, we started going through catalogues of double and variable stars and of course, the Messier and the NGC catalogue. M29 and M39 in Cygnus (Swan) were especially beautiful, although not as much as M27 (Dumbell planetary nebula) which is the closest nebula of that kind to Earth, only 700 light years away. Her little brother, little Dumbell, is also great to observe, but a bit more distant. Without a proper filter, using the Barlow lens, it looks great. If only we had those filters...

    We were impressed with M15, an open cluster in Pegasus, magnitude 6.2. We hadn't observed it before. Next stop was Cassiopeia, with open clusters M52 and M103, which are best observed through a 40mm eyepiece, no Barlow lens. And, of course, there's our "alien", a group of stars which look like a small alien with arms wide spread.

    Planets weren't so good for observation, although we managed to locate Uranus, enough to see it's just a light blue disk. Jupiter and Saturn weren't visible, we will have to wait until winter for them.

    We did well in the first clear night sky without the Moon after a while. Also, we managed to capture some photos of Andromeda (M31) and Pleiaides (M45) and other interesting space objects, using our Cannon camera. You can find them in our photo galleries.