The skies were beautiful upon arriving at Bragan. Some cloud was visible in the distance but the air was clear. Sadly there was a steady cold breeze which proved difficult to cope with as the night went on.
Some cloud did pass over and gave me a scare when it started to rain lightly but it had stopped before I even got the water proof sheet over the scope.
There were two new faces and five of us in total. It was a pleasure to meet the two new guys and their scopes were lovely setups and gave fine views of all the objects I looked at.
I started to feel a bit under the weather just after starting to observing. My headache was helped by one of the guys giving me a pain killer but stomach issues eventually made it too much to endure and with the the razor sharp chill of the wind all I could think about was being at home, warm and in my bed, so I packed up earlier than I had hoped.
Apart from that the night sky was actually fairly good. It didn't stand up to the brilliance of Friday night but some of my observations were above average.
Equipment = Skywatcher 14"
Location = Bragan
Seeing = 2
Trans = 3
Start Time = 21:27
NGC 188 - I couldn't see this on my star maps for a while so I decided to use my GO TO and glad I did, had I not I probably would never have found it as this has to been the faintest and most widely dispersed open cluster I've observed and as for it being Caldwell 1 it was a disappointing start.
NGC 40 - Much better. Caldwell 2 and some time since I observed this PN. It was looking really nice with great nebulosity and a well seen central star.
NGC 4236 - Appeared to be a faint edge on galaxy in the eyepiece but after looking at images it has a large disk but I was clearly observing the bright core region. I was surprised to find that it was filling almost all of the FOV in the 17mm.
NGC 2403 - Bright in appearance but not much detail, structure was strong giving it a easy to pick out disk shape.
NGC 4800 - Quite small and not much in the way of detail.
M106 - A fine view with NGC 4217 appearing nicely in the FOV.
NGC 4242 - This was a tricky one. Quite faint but appeared to have irregular shape.
NGC 4096 - Quite nice, looked almost edge on.
NGC 4157 - This was really nice. Lovely edge on galaxy with a thin delicate appearance with slight details. One of the better NGC objects I've observed in Ursa Major.
NGC 4088 - Strong structure with a pleasing shape and another galaxy, which wasn't listed on my maps, shared the FOV.
NGC 4026 - A beautiful sight. A really bright core with a pretty looking and well detailed disk.
NGC 3953 - Larger than I remember with a bright core and large disk.
NGC 4102 - Small with only a bright core and small disk.
Finish Time = 00:21
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