Into the lion's den

Another good night for backyard astronomy and it wasn't nearly as cold tonight. I decided to pick up some Messiers in Leo that I skipped last night: M65, 66, 95, and 105. The areas around M105 and M65 are full of nebulosties and it can be difficult to identify which is which. These are all very faint, small galaxies which made it all the more difficult. M105 was the first and it has another almost on top of it which made it fairly easy to identify. M65 and M66 are fairly close and fit into my 27mm ep FOV. There was a fairly bright star in the field to the north which turned out to be SAO99552, a magnitude 7 star which also shows up on my field guide. There was a small lambda like four star asterism that 'pointed' to M66 that wasn't in my CdC catalog. This is part of the 'Leo Triplett' galaxy group which I was surprised to find out looks a lot like my little sketch I made of the two galaxies. This area was quite a bit more interesting than the area around M105 probably because there were more bright stars in the fov. M65 and 66 are about 35 million light years from earth which is considerably farther than the objects I saw last night. Those are in our own Milky Way galaxy.
After snagging these five I switched over to M44, the Beehive cluster, and Mars which were both bright in my 7x50 fov. By this time there was a bit of haze starting to form. I was able to see Mars through my 10mm with 2x barlow but still could not see any detail.
All in all it wasn't a bad night although it started out nasty when I knocked my red dot finder loose and had to reset it in the dark.
It always amazes me when I see satellites pass through my fov. Seeing sats is one thing. You can almost always see a few mag 3 or 4 satellites on a dark night in a half hour or so but when I almost always see one by looking through a narrow field eye piece, I realize that "hey, there's a lot of stuff up there!". These of course are much dimmer at about mag 8 or 9.