Night sky
When you live in a large enough city, watching the stars is rare delicacy that you can't often afford. This semester I took a course on astronomy and it reminded me how much I missed watching the stars. You can live in the city and completely forget that there are stars beyond that gray dome but when you learn about cosmology, about why nebulae glow, about the life cycle of stars, about dying red giants like Aldebaran, the lack of night sky becomes unbearable.
So I listened to my heart and I bought a telescope. A really nice and short 90mm maksutov-cassegrain with an equatorial mount. It is a bit heavy for the aperture but the size is a perfect fit for a motorcycle backpack. Of course as soon as I bought it there was a streak of never ending clouds. At last, after a week I was able to take it out for its first light. Now, when you have a scope one its tripod and its mount aligned and ready to watch, where do you point it? I had my planisphere in hand but all those NGC numbers don't tell much about how interesting the object is and if you can expect to see them with a 90mm scope.
Since I can't spend all my nights looking at M42, I did my homework and found the deep sky objects that can be observed with a small scope and that are well positioned at this time of the year. There is no point in keeping this information for myself so I offer this late fall watch plan to my fellow amateur astronomers who live around 45° of north latitude.