I setup with the intention of viewing the moon, with my new Televue 20mm Plossl, first quarter is tomorrow March 25th at 1:01pm. I decided not to wait for darkness since the moon was fairly bright. I started out by spending time watching the shadows change in Theophilus, I picked it at random, in the same view was Cyrillus, Catharina, Madler and Torricelli. Torricelli was interesting because it looked like a tear drop. I watched the shadows vary on the easter slope of Thephilus while the western slope was in bright light, almost white. I was using my Virtual moon atlas on my laptop to identify the craters and mares etc... I then moved north to look at Aristotle and Eudoxus, what was really cool was the Caucasus mountains just to the south, the sunlight played on the mountains in such a way that it looked like a crater rim.
I decided to play with the celestron nexstar tour feature in my controller, I tried it just after I got the telescope and thought I was doing something wrong since it kept trying to point at objects on the horizon. Again it did the same but this time I knew where the objects were and they are on the horizon. Not sure why anyone would build a feature like that and include any objects below 30 degrees.
Moving on I setup on M35,very nice open cluster of white-blue stars. I switched to the 40mm eyepiece and the cluster was very nice and filled the eyepiece. M38 looked very nice in the 40mm, I tried the 20mm and preferred the 40mm. M36 looked best in the 20mm, M37 a most impressive open cluster. Tried NGC2419, saw nothing. Synced the telescope on Regulus. Still could not find NGC2419, it does not show up in my Starrynight backyard software. M93 a V-shaped open cluster, kind of looking through the tree branches so it might not been as impressive as it could have been. M46 was very nice open cluster, M47 also an open cluster but I can't see very many stars in it, again the tree was a small problem. M67 an open clsuter very impressive tonight. M40, a double star easily visible, I'm not sure why it's a Messier object it's not particulary impressive. M106 visible in 20mm, M97 is a no go. M81 is the best galaxy tonight, it's around 10:10pm. M63 is visible as a small smudge or fuzzy patch no real details visible. M51 almost not visible, I use this object sometimes to give me a sense of how DSO will appear on the given night. Tonight it was very difficult to see, not surprising with the moon still up. I checked out saturn as a last object before I went in, in the 20mm I saw, the following moons, Titan, Rhea, Iapetus, Dione, Tethyus and Mimas. I stopped at 10:25pm. These reports have been a lot more detailed since I got the Olympus digital recorder, I make around 30 messages in a 1 hour period, many are just informational to myself but as you can see many also make it into this log.