Good Evening and a Happy 2005 to all!

Wow, What a good 12 hours I've had! Suddenly a break in this insipient cloud cover and there are a few moments to looking up
towards the heavens once again! Over the Christmas period I have had the misfortune to be working almost everyday. Today, 2nd Jan 05 is my one day off before the next five on. Consequently, as I feel quite tired and not up to too much, I decided not to ring anyone and spend an hour or so lying on the back path armed with my trusty Bino's.

After tracking down the objects I could remember and using the centre pages from Astronomy now to decipher a few that I could recognize but not name, I decided to go hunting for M31 Andromeda.

Started off at Orion, followed the line across through Aldebaran in Taurus, past the Pleiades and on through Algol in Perseus. A bit
further and then stopping in Cassiopeia. The found the Box of Pegasus, line up the `top' star with bottom of the left hand `w' of
Cassiopeia and there it was. Near enough slap bang in the middle between them, M31 in all its glory!

Another one of those moments in astronomy when you get the buzz of achievement mixed with the excitement of finding something new.

And all this on the same day as my first truly successful lunar image, taken with new Canon Powershot G6 placed against the lens of
our Newtonian. Will need adaptors to use this correctly with the telescope, but as somewhere to start, it all looks very promising! I
will upload image to yahoo site, as soon as I have discovered how to do it! At the moment, images are between 1.1 and 1.6 MG and as I'm
only on dialup from home and not yet part of the brave new world of Broadband, it will take months to move an image this size and
probably crash the system in the process. Hope to talk to somebody for a little technical advice when we meet again, if not before!

I'm hoping it stays clear tonight, would like to re-acquaint myself with M44. Haven't seen it since last winter and found it quite
fascinating just to study its structure.

So, enough for now! I'm going to try and start using this site as often as I can and would encourage others to do the same. It only
takes a little while to type a quick blog and think it would be a useful if we could share our observations, thereby aiding better
communications between us and harbouring an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding. Sounds very grandiose, but I'm sure you know what I mean!

Anybody else fancy Blogging their own activities in the glorious heavens?