New Year's Eve

We left the Little Desert and traveled over to the Grampians, for a change of scene during the day but still dark skies for observing. It was an horrendously hot day, which cooled off only gradually; and to make matters worse, it was incredibly windy - gusts up to 90kph in our area apparently. This made seeing decidedly sub-optimal; while I was still stooging around trying to get a good view of Jupiter, J announced that there was basically no point in me looking for double stars, because resolving them was going to be a pain in the butt. Tragedy! What was I going to do instead?!

Well, I had planned on looking at interesting things and doubles in Canis Major, so I did check out the open cluster NGC2362; it looked all right with averted vision, with quite a bright centre. I also tried looking at the open cluster + emission nebula of NGC2264, but the nebulosity was so faint through Ptolemy (90mm) that I might as well have been making it up.

I didn't have anything else planned, and was feeling a little weary to be honest (two nights of bed at 3am, and a 40C day, will apparently do that to you). So I decided to let J do all the work and just get the advantage of looking through the 16" Dob. He had a plan for looking at some galaxies in Fornax and Colomba, so that's what I did too. We saw:
* NGC1808, a long faint but obvious galaxy, with a bright centre;
* NGC1851, a tendrilly yet compact globular cluster;
* NGC2090 and NGC2188, both faint smears;
* NGC1792, a bigger grey smudge with a couple of bright spots visible;
* a group of five - maybe six - galaxies all visible within the same field of view (1 degree).

In between looking at those, I did end up going back and playing with Ptolemy. Firstly, I set the Argo to Identify, and played around finding stars: I now know Procyon, Castor and Pollux, and confirmed that Aldebaran is indeed that star in Taurus. Plus, I know where the constellation Lepus is (ish). Secondly, I decided to see what Messiers I could find. Most I had already seen before - M93 (boring open cluster); M46 and M47 (awesome to see in the same field of view, nice contrast with one tight and one loose open cluster); M50 (almost unviewable through the 35mm, being too small/dim). But I did get two new ones to tick off: M48 (small and dim open cluster), and M67 (another open cluster that I do like; it looks like someone took a bite out of the side). I was going to look for more but then my Argo's batteries died! Oh the humanity.

By this stage it was midnight, so we took a final tour of some old faves - 47Tuc, which looked INCREDIBLE and as fake as ever; the Tarantula Nebula, which I choose to think of as resembling a flower; and, of course, M42, whose nebulosity just looked brilliant through the Dob. I had to get a bigger eyepiece to get a better view of it!