Gregoria Luna's Astronomy Blog

 My 10" Dobsonian (SkyWatcher FlexTube 250P) finally gets its first reasonably dark test.

First night of decent seeing for a while, so I took my dob out to look at planets. Last night I went out to observe Mars late, but the darn scope wouldn't cool down and the image was horrible . Tonight was pretty good. In addition to doing some planet viewing, I got some exploration done, and it's always a nice night when you get to see something new.

 A few days ago I became aware of comet C/2020 M3 ATLAS, which was passing through Orion. I resolved that I would give it a try with my 6" f/8 Dobsonian some time. The past few days have had excellent transparency, so I've been using most of them to get some observing done. Two days ago I first tried the comet, but couldn't confirm it. Tonight, I went out again, and I'm pretty sure I got it. Despite not intending to make a big deal of it, I stayed out nearly an hour, did some exploration and found some star clusters.

 I've kind of dropped the ball with my blog this week. Here's a few updates, and some sketches too.

I had no idea, going in to creating a blog, that my very first observing report for this blog would be so eventful. Not only did I have an amazing night, but it had a rocky start. I got great observing done tonight in the end.

This is an article I wrote for Telescopic Watch that I'm genuinely proud of. Other than the inherent pointlessness of ranking Deep Sky Objects on a tiered list like this. If I could post it in full on my blog, I would. Instead, I'll have to link it here. https://telescopicwatch.com/top-deep-sky-objects-for-beginners/  I would love to share my sketches in their final form on the blog, but I suspect that would cause problems. Instead I'll share the unedited version of three of my sketches. You can see how well they turned out in inverted form in the article linked above.