Back after yet another long absence. I took the scope out for a quick look around tonight just to get back into the swing of things. No power, no chair, no table, just the scope and the eyepiece case.

  I chose a bright star in the west and used it to focus and check the collimation. After getting everything set, focused, and collimated, I realized I was looking at Vega. So, since I was in the neighborhood I took a look at M57, the Right Nebula. It looked like the bright donut that it usually looks like.

  But, I wanted to see the Andromeda Galxy (M31) so I didn’t linger long at M57. Andromeda was visible with just the naked eye and obvious in the finder. It was obviously oval but I wasn’t able to see any other detail.

  In low power views of the Andromeda Galaxy I did happen to notice a galaxy at the edge of the field of view. Low power (62x) just showed a fuzziness instead of a star-like image. Once I switched to higher power views (125x and 167x) I could see that it was a spherical looking bright galaxy. I’m still trying to figure out if it was M32 or M110!

  A nice little refresher. I’ll be diving in much deeper in the days to come. Stay tuned!