Two nights rolled into one

Going to fill in some of the blanks with one post.

Woke up at 4:30 on Monday morning to get a leg up on my first views of Jupiter. There it is was making it way up to the east. Four moons were visible with two on each side. Had quite a bit of atmosphere and the ep's have seen better days but was a joy to look at the Jovian Giant of our solar system through the C8. I managed to knock off four globular clusters before it became too light to play, M4,M80, M62 and M19.

So went out after dark and setup to grab a few looks. Found what I thought was Ceres and went and woke up Donna to show her. The reason I and she confirmed this as Ceres as it was not a pinpoint of light when focused but showed as a reflected object and did not look like a star. Next up was M104, the Sombrero Galaxy. Spent time using the different ep's and we were able to pick out the dark line of dust using averted view. Brought in NGC 4699 and NGC 4697, fuzzies of different sizes basically. Moved to M64 the Blackeye Galaxy and could only resovle so much. Last up was M5 to show what a globular looked like once again.

A big list from the next night 3/31 as I worked on the Virgo Cluster. Looked at 15 Messier's and a few NGC's. Will do these in my next post.