My astronomical activities come in waves. There was a time I was very busy with my Celestron 14. My goal was to log all the star clusters, galaxies and nebulae in Burnham's Celestial Handbook north of 45 degrees south declination. There are still two or three dozen objects that culminate low, mostly in cold, cloudy parts of the year, that I have missed, but basically, I finished that task years ago.

Yet lately I have been looking at a lot of new stuff. In the last several months that includes about a hundred double stars, three comets, two asteroids, several planetary nebulae, some galactic clusters, a whole lot of lunar topography, and one speeding alien spacecraft bearing a US citizen who wants to come home.

Double stars are a lot of fun. They are almost as diverse visually as galaxies, and there are lots more of them accessible to small instruments -- probably more than a thousand that I can separate with even as tiny an instrument as a 60 mm refractor. They provide a variety of challenges -- close ones of equal brightness are quite different than wide ones in which the companion is very faint. They can be observed -- assuming you can find them -- even when the moon is up, or when there is light pollution of human origin.

Comet Hyakutake started my current run of activity; how wonderful and memorable it was to watch its ever-increasing brightness and ever-lengthening tail. Kopff isn't nearly as interesting, though Hale-Bopp promises to be.

I had never logged an asteroid until I spotted Vesta naked-eye during its recent opposition. Ceres was also obvious in a small telescope, via a decent finder chart.

One planetary nebulae was one of my "missing" Burnham objects -- NGC 5873, down in Lupus. There are lots of planetaries, but finding the smaller ones without very deep charts is not so much difficult as tedious -- "blinking" with a narrow-band filter does work, but it is quite time-consuming and some times not very conclusive. There are also lots of low-density galactic clusters that did not make the New General Catalog or the Index Catalog, that I can dredge up to observe.

I had never looked very much at the Moon. I knew most of the Maria and a handful of craters, of course, but not enough to feel at home. Most of my lunar viewing had been of the form, "gee, look at all the craters", whereupon my eyes would glaze over and I would turn to something else. During the last lunation, though, I got hold of a copy of Cherrington's book, and followed the Moon nearly every night from new to well past full, identifying craters and other features at or near the terminator. Now I know enough to orient myself when viewing, and that makes lots of difference in enjoyment. The amount of detail to be seen is amazing -- my 60 mm refractor resolves to about 4 Km, the six-inch Intes to 1.4 Km, and the Celestron 14 to about 600 meters. One way to see what this means is to imagine transporting these telescopes to Luna and looking back at the Earth. The C-14 could resolve coarse detail -- big open areas and so on -- in the industrial park area where I work.