Yesterday we were blessed by the first clear night in almost two weeks. 80mm of aperture is unimpared when it comes to open clusters, and I spent a couple of hours looking at OC and DN. The find of the day was NGC7209, a very delicate open cluster in Lacerta. It looks very small at low power, but resolves into a lot of "small" (in Herschel sense of the word) beautiful stars that fill my field of view at 100x (27 arc min). I failed to find much beauty in M39 again, but was fascinated by M34 with its pagoda shape. Nebulosity in NGC281 looked exactly as in the book at 22x. Merope nebula was kind of easy with UHC (I guess the filter kills most of the light pollution even this is a reflection nebula - as Inge has noted here).
In the end Orion had risen high enough and I looked at M42/M43. The night was dark, and the nebula was so large and bright that I almost fell over! The best view was at 22x (my new 18mm Ultima), it was great both with UHC and unfiltered, with Trapezium well resolved. I still strongly suspect that we cannot see all its splendour at this latitude (57N)... After that I checked Rosette nebula - and saw it for the first time. I couldn't make out the shape, but when I moved the scope away from the central cluster, the sky suddenly would become jet-black. Finally I tried to see it with naked eye through the UHC filter - and saw it as an "out-of-focus star". It disappeared without the filter.
Dmitri
In the end Orion had risen high enough and I looked at M42/M43. The night was dark, and the nebula was so large and bright that I almost fell over! The best view was at 22x (my new 18mm Ultima), it was great both with UHC and unfiltered, with Trapezium well resolved. I still strongly suspect that we cannot see all its splendour at this latitude (57N)... After that I checked Rosette nebula - and saw it for the first time. I couldn't make out the shape, but when I moved the scope away from the central cluster, the sky suddenly would become jet-black. Finally I tried to see it with naked eye through the UHC filter - and saw it as an "out-of-focus star". It disappeared without the filter.
Dmitri