Time outside : 22:45 – 00:00

The seeing was not so good. At one point, Jupiter got lost in the murk, and overall it was a battle. Added to my usual suspects (Castor for alignment, Jupiter for wow) I got a bit of Mars, ish. I got a bit of Dubhe, though I really need to extend the tripod for that. Back, cricked.

And my alignment seemed to go out of whack very quickly, so I was left with cluster hunting by star hops and hope. But I did track down the Great Hercules Cluster (M13), though a thin smear of cloud didn’t help the bad atmospherics as it was. Takes up about an inch in the eyepiece, best with a bit of averted vision. No point in imaging it, not under those conditions.

Summer. Great for cluster lovers (like me), but damn, you have to stay up later, and it never really gets that dark. Ah well. But you can observe in shorts and teeshirt.