Solar System viewing

Conditions:
Clear, bad transparency, moderate seeing, moon 4 days past full

Targets Observed:
Come C3/2003 K4 (LINEAR), Uranus, Moon

Notes
Mostly stuck to the solar system tonight, although tried my hand at finding Struve 2470 and 2474, the other double-double in Lyra. No luck there.

At any rate, the comet tonight had moved and was easy to find. Chi Her forms a nice triangle with 4 Her and 2 Her. Drawing a line through the triangle from 4 Her pointed right at the comet, which was just heading behind a tree limb. The comet crossed into Bootes, probably as I was looking at it.

After the fruitless search for the doubles in Lyra, I looked at the Moon for a while, figuring I'd pack it in. The walled plain Cleomedes was on the terminator tonight, just north of Mare Crisium. It has a small mountain in the centre the tip of which was still in sunlight, rising from the darkness of the floor. The walls are 3000 meters high, which is big.

Coming in, I did a quick lookup of the planet's positions, and discovered that both Neptune and Uranus were up, hanging around the moon in front of me. I turned the scope on a bright patch of sky in Aquarius and found Uranus. This was the first time I had seen it. It was easy in binoculars opnce I knew where to look, forming a little pair with a 6.5 mag star just north east of Sigma Aqr. I'll look for Neptune tomorrow night, over in Capricorn.