I had a short but focused session last night. My initial goal was to capture Mars and Uranus with the planetary camera but the supermoon made things a bit difficult. I hope to revisit these planets later this year.

The summer triangle is slowly moving away from my usual observation sights so I’ll need to say my goodbyes soon to Vega, Deneb and Altair. New other prominent objects are showing up now, such as the lovely Pleiades.

I decided to have one last look at M57 and took an almost 4 minute exposure with the ZWO224MC.

The reward was worth the effort:

The area with the least clouds for me lately is everything within the summer triangle.

It’s actually possible to capture M57 with a smartphone and 25 mm eyepiece:

Clear, dark sky today, unfortunately on a midweek, so little time to observe.

I had a good look at the Dumbbell Nebula again and failed to find M56, a globular cluster. I did find another target though, the Blinking Planetary Nebula, with very little effort (or lots of luck, not sure).

The Messier catalogue consists of 110 deep sky objects discovered by Charles Messier. I managed to get two of them in my sights yesterday and even took a picture.

The Ring Nebula on the left shows as a faint grey ring through the scope but has a vibrant color palette only visible with cameras. The Andromeda Galaxy on the right is a very faint grey spot in my telescope and shows up as a fuzzy light ball in the picture.

The rest of the night was spent under a Waning Gibbous moon. Deep in the night I had Saturn, the moon, Jupiter and Mars all in the same part of the sky. All those planets will have optimal viewing conditions later this month and in case of Mars at the end of the year.