okay, report:

• good lord, Antares and Vega are offensively bright once you adjust to the dark.

• M4!! HOLY GUACAMOLE WOW! M4 by itself made being out tonight worth it!

• M80: cool, felt cool to find it, but it looks like any of the other tighter globs and I didn’t want to mess with switching to one of my narrow AFOV higher power eyepieces on my manual dob. May revisit once I invest in a higher power eyepiece with a decent AFOV.

• Epsilon Lyrae: hmm, am I maybe just not using enough mag? looks like a regular double star to me.

• Took the telescope for a slew through Sagittarius, for a laugh, was not disappointed. Breathtaking amount of stars there.

• Was all aboard the strugglebus making sense of Hercules’s constellation. Didn’t help that he was at the zenith, which made using the dob weird when looking for M13 and made looking at the constellation annoying after staring straight up like a turkey for minutes.

• Took some time to re-acquaint myself with Draco, Cygnus, and Aquila.

• Didn’t pick out any more DSOs, in part because I got annoyed with blowing out my night vision, even with the red light, on my charts.

• I’ve been fairly serious about the hobby for about 9 months now, and it seems like I saw way more satellites out tonight than I did when I stopped back in May. Bruh, the little bastards were everywhere.