Neptune and a tale of two asteroids

We got home from our squaredance workshop in St. Louis last night about midnight so early this morning about 1:00 I hauled out the 8" to show Judy what Neptune looked like.  It was easy to find out east of Capricorn and made a pretty blue sight.  Before quitting for the night I swung around to the Andromeda Galaxy.  It was visible unaided, a ghostly smudge above Andromeda's two familiar arcs of stars north of Pegasus' square.  It took a bit of gymnastics and rolling around on the deck to get the scope pointed but what a sight it was.  I was able to easily see all three Messier objects: huge M31, medium size M32, and tiny little M110.  M31 didn't all fit into my 25mm's FOV.  It was quite chilly, down into the 50's, so I quit early and went to bed.
Tonight I decided to check out two of the brighter asteroids that are near opposition this month: 7Iris and 324Bamberga.  I had never heard of 324 since it has such a high number and they are usually out of range of my 8" let alone my 7x50s.  It was featured in the September S&T along with Iris so I thought I'd check them both out since they are in the same neighborhood.  Iris was high at 11:00pm and easy to find in Aquarius' arm which lies above Capricorn. It lies just above a line drawn from Beta to Epsilon Aqr.  It was a very dim 8 mag in my 7x50's but easy enough to see with averted vision.  The hard part was determining which mag 8 point was the asteroid and which were stars!  There were several stars nearby but Iris was just below HD202221 in a line of about 5 8th magnitude stars near (7)Iris.
By the time I was finished playing with Iris, the circlet of Pisces was peeking out above the oak tree in back.  That blasted old pin oak is smack in the middle of my eastern sky but the birds like it.  324 was about a third of the way along a line between Gamma and Theta Psc.  It's the only thing nearby so it was easier to pick out than Iris.
Seeing wasn't as good tonight as this morning.  The sky seemed hazy and dim stars were coming and going in the unstable atmosphere.  All in all though, two dim asteroids in binocs in a single night wasn't a bad haul.

Gamma Ophiuchi neighborhood

Another cool, clear night in the Ozarks with no moon.  It was a bit humid and dew was falling but I thought I should take advantage of the night as there won't be too many of them left before we hit the road again and/or the moon comes back out.  I saw Ophiuchus high in the south so I thought I'd revisit Gamma Ophiuchi's neighborhood with the 8" dob.  IC4665 was nice in binocs the other night so I snagged it first after setting up.  Hauling out the dob and assorted paraphernalia is sure harder than grabbing 7x50's and a star chart!  At least it doesn't need alignment.  The open cluster is a bright one that I can just make out unaided resting above Beta Oph.  At first glance it looks like a ring of fairly bright 9 blue stars with a kind of fish hook appendage of 4 more blue stars, and a central star in the ring that goes out when I look right at it.After staring at it for awhile I began to notice that the fish hook closed on itself with two more very dim stars into a kind of tear drop shape with HD161603 at the pointy end of the drop.  Inside the drop were several other very dim stars including a mag 12 GSC-424-0179!  That has to be one of the dimmest stars I've seen.
Emboldened, I next went after Collinder 350, another open cluster in the Gamma Oph neighborhood.  It looked nice in my 25mm ep and I explored some of the dimmer groups of stars.I thought I might have found an asteroid near SAO122777 but after checking another star chart it appears to have been just another star. Finally I went after globular cluster NGC6426.  I wasn't able to verify it for certain but I believe I caught a glimpse of a faint fuzzy where it should have been.  Not bad for a mag 13 surface brightness!  I'll have to go after a brighter globular next time just to satisfy my delight in finding these curious objects.
It eventually got too dewey for good viewing so I decided to quit for the night and feed the coons.