Tonight was very clear and cool so I decided to take the 8" out and see what I could find in Virgo again. I had tried previously without a lot of luck. There is a lot here but it's rather dim. I went out armed with my overall chart of 11 galaxies in Virgo (M49, 58, 59, 60, 84 86 87, 88, 89, 90, 91) to see what I could see. I found M59 and M60 right off the bat at the right angle of a triangle formed from the two most eastern stars of the Virgo 'V' or 'cup' (del and eps vir). They are near a small 'xmas tree' asterism composed of Rho and 27 Vir and a couple of other 7th magnitude stars. Both M59 and 60 were easily visible is my 25mm ep. It had been awhile since I used it so it took some time to get used to the orientation of my dob and I had the usual assortment of problems standing on my head to see through the red dot finder, tripping over the battery wire, etc. I found M58 near a diamond shaped asterism of mag 8-10 stars (SAO 100178 etc) to the west. M89 was another small fuzzy just west of a chain of six dim 10th mag stars in a W pattern. All four objects were easy to see but not a lot of detail without study. M90 whould have been on the other side of the 'W' but I didn't notice it. I need to revisit these when I'm not as tired. My Tycho 2 catalog is a good one to use for star fields in this area.
I continued my observation of Lyrae doubles Beta and R. Bet Lyr was brighter than R Lyra tonight. I estimated Beta at mag 4 using 32 and 43. R Lyr was 4.7 using 44 and 47 at 11:30 PM.
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