Observation reports

Saturday 4th October 2025

On this day, we had fine weather here in Kostanay/ Kazakhstan, the sun was shining and it was about 11 degree Celsius, also in the evening it wasn't cooling down so much. Although since late afternoon some cirrhus clouds slowly moved over the sky. 

One uncle-in-law visited us in the evening, and he also is interested in astronomy (what is not usual here in Kazakhstan!), so I decided to put my vintage Celestron C90 out again, starting at half past eight.

The moon was shining so bright, that we sometimes could see cirrhus clouds and, as usual, the effects of haze in the air and the light. 

First I showed and observed the moon, of course. We were able to magnificate about 133x, so watched some details on the lunar surface, for instance Aristarchus I could even see the structures of the white ejecta on the bright side of the crater's wall, and of course the central montain. Also impressing to follow the Schroeter's valley, find some smaller craters on the ground of Schickard, see the structures of Gassendi and so on... Below is my smartphone's single shot of the moon.

Afterwards moved to Saturn, impressing the brightness of its ring, that is now more a like bright line. We could only see his biggest satellite, Titan. But my uncle-in-law was really fascinated of Saturn, as he hasn't seen the "king of the ring" before... "My goodness! Amazing, like on nice photos in the internet.." he commented (allthough in my eyes we weren't able to see details on Saturn...).

After this he posed the "critical question", what other planets might be seen now... Knowing, that Uranus was still standing too low and would be hidden by neighbour's house and trees, I told him, that only Neptune is theoretically visible, but not sure, that I would find the farest planet. This planet I have only "visited" using much bigger scopes mostly on a mount with auto guiding - but just with a little Celestron C90 on a simple old EQ3 mount, under a light polluted sky ?!?

"Please, let's do it!"...

So I started the difficult star hopping from Saturn to Neptune, that took nearly half an hour, but then could find this faint small blueish disc. To make sure, that I indeed had found Neptun, I increased magnification. At last used my "old-but-gold" Vixen ortho 5mm (crazy magnification on this small Maksutov!), what for my astonishment was possible and could state, that the star hopping search ad been succesful. So, at least, we were glad to see this planet; especially I must emphasize, that I never would have tried this without his question!

At last and after this astro- session, the day ended at one o' clock after some beer and discussing different things, not only astronomy...

P.S. in the time between, what means after after two glasses of beer, we remembered the scope outside, it was about midnight. But the view through eyepiece showed just a "milky moon"... due to little ice on the frontplate (as shown on the image below). We hadn't expected, that it would become such cold outside so soon.