Binocular Browsing

Date: 17th March 2010, Wednesday
Observation Time: 9:30pm to 10pm (~30mins)
Location: Home.
Weather: clear sky.. but light polluted
Instruments: Nikon 10x50 binoc

I really never browsed thru skies from new home. though i have mounted the telescope, I really invested time into how much i can see from my patio. Also it was good refresher for some winter/spring constellations.

Heavy light pollution.. Can only see bright stars by naked eye.. NELM may be betn 3-4. Thats based on Ursa Minor. Polaris (alpha), beta clearly visible.. Gamma was in-out.. and i didn't see any other stars.

Double Cluster: It wasn't visible by naked eye.. probably few stars in there, but really hard to tell if its a cluster.. hence bino is required. Cassiopeia Gamma-Delta line directly points to double cluster. Clearly see one of the clusters. With lot of bright stars, but the second cluster is lil hard to detect..

Pleiades: Nice star cluster. 7 stars visible naked eye. 9 stars visible thru binoc. All bright stars in the Perseus upper arm are clearly visible and they point to Pleiads. Interesting thing i notices is the number of stars in the background of pleiades.. they are like bunch of stars, way fainter, but heavy in concentration behind it.. i never noticed them before.

Algol: The lower arm has only 3 bright stars. One at the joint with the upper arm Alpha-Mirfak, Algol, and one more star Rho-Per. Algol was brighter than Rho, but fainter than Alpha. dont know abt Algol's current magnitude.. need to follow it more..

M1: Failed.. Picked up the wrong location. Tried to look for it above zeta Tuari, but it should be below, inside the V shape.

M35: Can clearly see whole Gemini constellation. M35 is on Tau side way above Zeta Tau. V-Mu-Eta-M35 form rotatated parallelogram. M35, fainter..still visible..seems bigger.

M36-M38-M37: M36 is the middle one, while M38 is inside Auriga. Either M36-M38 or M36-M37 fit in the same view. ~4-5 deg apart from each others. M36 seems to be brighter and seems smaller than other two. M38 bigger than other two ??

Quick Orion browsing: M42 nebula visible. Mintaka fainter than belt stars. Mruga-Shirsha Cr69 visible. really widespread..

Quick browsing for Canis Major: M41 seemed lil brighter than M35. Probably bigger than M35?

Tau CMa: Cluster is not visible in binoculars.. it just seemed to be a bright star..

M46-M47: M47 the brighter and widespread one is clearly visible.. again the M46 the fainter one feels like to be there but not sure.. These are like two FoV away from sirius.. i.e. 10-12 deg away from Sirius.

M93: Because of recent browsing, found it easily. Seemed to be like M35.. probably fainter than it.. can clearly see it.

M44: FAILED. I thought this should have been easier to see in binocs.. but as it was overhead, was tricky.. got the location correct, betn lion sickle and proceyon, but still didn't find it.