Finally some observing!

The weather finally cleared up after several days of clouds and a full moon before that.  I lugged the AD10 out into the back yard to get some observing time in.  I don't have a lot of sky to look at from my small yard.  My house is right to the south, the neighbor is about 30 feet away to the north.  There's a tree to the west, and the neighbors on the east have bright lights shining all night.  Regardless, I pressed on.

Jupiter was pretty close to the zenith, so that's where I started.  It was extremely clear and steady, great seeing.  I was able to use my 9mm in a 2x Barlow, so about 278x.  With this I could easily see lots of detail on the surface.  Io was next to it and I could see the shadow of two of the moons, Io and Ganymede if I'm not mistaken.  This was also a good opportunity to practice tracking an object using the dobsonian mount.  It still feels a bit awkward, but I'll get used to it.

I tried to look for M97 and M108 in Ursa Major, but didn't have any luck.  Partly because of the lighting and partly because I don't know what I'm doing yet.  So I swung around to Auriga which was in a much better position.  I tried to locate a few things in the area, but still didn't have any luck.  I was using an old copy of Tirion's Bright Star Atlas 2000.0, but I found it hard to relate the small size of the maps to what I was seeing the scope.  Since I couldn't find anything in particular, I spent a while panning around with sky with my scope.  I spotted some double stars and saw lots of pretty, colorful star fields.

Now I'm reading up on how to star hop, so hopefully I'll be able to find some things next time.  I've got Cartes Du Ciel, which is a free program that can generate and print star maps, as well as Stellarium (another free planitarium software), and a couple of others.  I'm hoping that those, along with the Tonight's Sky observation planning web page, will give me the tools I need to star hop successfully.  I'm also planning to build a leveling base with setting circles for my AD10.  Along with the SkEye app on my phone, I should be able to find things.