As many people who own telescopes, one usually has a regular that they use more often than not. Mine has obviously been the 70mm f/10, which I have talked about on many occasions. In the night and daytime sky, I have best found a way to classify each type of object groups as medias.
A media is a group of one kind of objects, like the deep sky for example. This group could the be broken down in to smaller subgroups such as star clusters, nebulae, etc. Solar system media includes solar observing, planetary observing and lunar observing. This could also be yet divided again into more subgroups such as certain types of craters on the moon, the list goes on and on.
I was observing 2 medias last night, the deep sky group and the lunar group. For the majority of the night, it was the deep sky which was observed as the moon is in its waning phases currently. First on my list was M22, a prominent bright globular cluster in the constellation of Sagittarius. It is very bright with a distinctive oval shape. Even with the blinding lights from the LA county fair glowing bright, many stars were on the edge of resolution and some were individually picked out.
After M22 came M11, the famous compact open cluster known as the Wild Duck Cluster. Many objects were viewed last night and the list is too numerous to mention. Just when I decided to bring it in, I noticed most of Cassiopeia peaking over the roof of the house and swung my scope over for a look. The Double Cluster was still too low, and the light from the moon was coming in the east. I decided to choose NGC 457, an open cluster that many people see an owl or “E.T.” from t.he hit movie. I never saw the owl shape but the E.T. shape came right out instantly.
Just before I went in, the moon also came up high enough and just for the blog I took a picture:
Clear Skies.
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The Young Astronomer 