This is my first observing report for a newly purchased 8" LX-200 f/10 SCT. I took it out late at night on Thursday, May 11, in my backyard in Sunnyvale.
I mostly used the 26mm that came with the scope (77x), and first looked at the moon. The first thing I noticed where the saw tooth shape of the shadows in Plato, as compared to the more even shape of the shadow in Eratosthenes. The level of detail visible compared to my old 4" Dobsonian was just amazing, and I could spend hours going up and down the terminator, but alas, the moon soon went behind a tree, and I had to stop. I wish I had a better lunar map so that I could determine the names of features other than the major craters and mares.
I then moved to the Messier objects that I could see that weren't blocked by trees or the house. I hadn't observed any of these objects before other than M13, and was very eager to see what I could see.
They all looked a bit washed out, but the seeing was still pretty good for the city. I first looked at globular clusters. M13, M3 and M92 were nice and grainy, and I counted about 10 individual stars in M13. M56 was faint, but visible, and M71 was just barely visible as very faint patch of light.
I then turned to M57. The ring structure was amazing, and was worth looking at for a long time.
I bought a SkyGlow filter from Orion, and I tried observing all the objects both with and without the filter. With all the above objects, it didn't make much of a difference in visibility, other than reducing the overall brightness a bit.
The filter made the biggest difference with M27 and M17. Without it they were completely washed out. I took a while, but I could make out the shapes of both objects. M27 did look like a dumbbell, and M17 looked like the silhouette of a swan.
M40 was easily visible, and the red color of the closest star (70 Ursae Majoris according to Starry Night) was apparent compared to the white light of the two stars.
M11 was very impressive to look at. From the pictures I'd seen on the web, I wasn't sure why it was called the Wild Duck cluster, but it does indeed look like a flying duck as seen from below and to the right, with the brightest star in the cluster on it’s left wing. It also looks a bit like a stellar twister.
I couldn't make out any nebulosity in M16, but the close cluster of stars was rather nice to look at, although not as impressive as M11.
This was the largest number of Messier objects I’d ever seen in one night. I'm quite impressed with the light gathering capability of this scope (this is the largest scope I've looked through, if you don't count the 36" refractor at Mt. Hamilton :-).
It's too bad the planets aren't going to be up anytime soon. I can't wait to take the scope out to some darker skies.