as promised, a stargazing report

This makes it official; I'm a geek. This is what happens when I get bored and have a pair of binoculars, a planisphere, a red-filter on a flashlight, and Excel.

Edit - Crap. I forgot how Blogger doesn't like tables. Keep scrolling down, I swear there's more to this post, including a table of all 110 Messier Objects and the ones I've seen. Looks best in Firefox (sorry IE folks). I'll try to fix it later, I just don't have the energy right now. *grumbles about Blogger and what it does with its mother*

Edit 2 - Since Blogger hates tables for some reason, so I made the table as an external HTML page.

Link to my Messier Obect Checklist (Will open in a new window).

This is definitely a sign of a woman who has too much time on her hands, and can't stand the daytime heat (it's 97 right now). I've seen everything checked off in binoculars (technically I could say I've seen every Messier Object, but somehow I don't think scanning the sky with the naked eye counts). After last night's session, which I added M15, M31, M32, M110, that makes the tally 23 down, 87 to go. Oh, plus I saw 2 satellites. Sadly, I didn't see any part of the June Lyrids that I can be certain about. The neurological damage causes me to see random lights on occasion, so I don't know if what I saw was a neurological hiccup, or a meteor in my peripheral vision. For the past week I've definitely seen about one meteor a night, but then I didn't have binoculars glued to my face then, either.

Here's the source of most of the data for my table/checklist. Complete with pretty pictures.