Spring Break Stargaze

From 7:56ish to about 10:00pm, I went stargazing with Drew and my brother David out in Myakka. After setting up the huge Cassegrain with Mr. Percival, I got to punch in a whole lots of M objects: We went M-hunting. Most of these were open clusters, but we also got to see a couple of galaxies and globular fuzzy patches. The M objects seen included M93, which kind of looks like a butterfly; M34 which has a distinctive stringlike pattern; M79 in Lepus; M42 with trapezium and 43 in Orion; M47 and a dimmer M46, which has a small nebula in its field of view-- best seen with an oxy 3 filter (which blocks all wavelengths save O2)-- in Puppis; M1 the fuzzy crab nebula (supernova remnant?) in Taurus; M41 in Sirius: a cool bright open cluster; M44 the Beehive in Cancer; M63?; M78: a reflection nebula in Orion (and I got to see a meteor while viewing it in the telescope!); M35 in Gemini: which has a distinctive arc; Auriga's M36 with an arm shape to it, m37 which is faint but dense, and M38 which is less dense. Some galaxies included M94, M49 in Virgo, the Leo Triplet, M51, and M66 and M65 which are part of the Marcurian Chain between Canes Venatici and Virgo. We also got to see Jupiter and the Galilean moons and Saturn with at least 4 moons including Titan in high power; we could also see their equatorial bands. We also pointed out the milky way and the north galactic pole in Canes Bernice.
That was so cool! And we got to see three horses too.