Another beautiful array of Jupiter, the moon and Venus after sunset. I attempted another sketch of the moon, but even though now five days old it remains a challenge given its low altitude and an array of tall buildings on that horizon. This shows Mare Nectaris -- the orange/brown area in the sketch -- with Theophilus above it, Cyrillus F to its right and then Beaumont. The crater on the far right of the sketch is high-walled Piccolomini. My guess is that the two craters shown to the left of Mare Nectaris are, top to bottom, Isidorus and Capella. The semicircular protuberance on the right of Mare Nectaris is Fracastorius. Poor seeing and a haze that rendered the moon an orangey colour made it very difficult to pick out much detail with these features. The result is a messy sketch, drawn in much haste.
A beautiful conjunction of the waxing crescent moon and Venus after sunset, with Jupiter further to the south. In terrible seeing, compounded by horizon haze, and with very limited time before the moon disappeared below the urban skyline, I sketched Mare Crisium and adjacent Cleomedes; the wall of the terminator side of Crisium jutting into the darkened lunar surface beyond.
Through 10x50s saw the Andromeda Galaxy dimly on Oct 31st.
Jupiter brilliant in the south early evening. Sometimes in recent days it has been possible to see both Jupiter and Venus at the same time when gaps between buildings allow. Saw (by chance) Lacrosse 2, an American spy satellite, high overhead passing through the summer triangle at 6:32pm. It looked brighter at first than the magnitude given in Heavens Above, but soon faded to the advertised figure.
Looked for NGC 6866, an open cluster in Cygnus, later in the evening. It was in an area of sky quite brightly illuminated by city lights, but limiting magnitude through the ETX-90 26mm lens was still adequate at around 10. The cluster was not readily apparent, but with averted vision several faint stars popped in and out of view, extedning between GSC 3162:590 and GSC 3162:1131. Some of this richer field relates to the cluster, but the cluster's borders were not readily apparent.
In the afternoon and early evening, in relatively clear sky (later largely obscured by haze) I looked at the spotless sun and then, shortly after sunset, Venus. I've never followed its phases closely (the last attempt was in January). Here is my sketch of what I thought I saw using the ETX-90 and 20mm EP with 2x Barlow. It is reassuringly close to the image (mine is a mirror one) produced by this site: http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/diskmap.php. Spotting it in a crescent phase would be trickier, it being closer to the sun then.
Murky post-Olympic skies, bad weather and work have prevented much viewing recently. I would have liked to see Shenzhou 7 while it was orbiting late last month but cloud prevented that. Oct 8, however, was a clear evening and I managed to get a bit of binocular viewing in. For some reason I decided to check my estimates of the relative magnitudes of the defining stars of the Great Square of Pegasus against their actual values. To my surprise I found that Algenib at the bottom left of the square and Scheat at the top right appeared of similar magnitude to my eye but were indicated by the software as being quite different: Algenib at 2.83 and Scheat at 2.44. Wondering whether Scheat might be a variable (rather than my judgment impaired) I checked online later and found indeed that it is, with an irregular variation of magnitude that would reduce its brightness to close to that of Algenib.
