
I just got me a pair of 10x50 binoculars today (not particularly great for astronomy, but I got them more for wildlife watching on the work cruise I'm going on next week up the BC coastline). But I tried them out tonight (about 10pm PST) for a bit of skywatching and they weren't too bad.
I found all the planets that were up. I could see Venus as a small disk, but I couldn't see the half-phase that it's supposed to be in (according to Celestia anyway). I saw Mars as a smaller red disk, and Saturn as a small yellow disk (I couldn't make out the rings though). Jupiter was obviously a disk, and I saw a dot to the lower-left of it that was Ganymede and Io (they're very close to eachother), and just about made out Callisto further to the left. But it wasn't easy to make out the moons.
I also saw the Pleiades (very nice), I think I saw the Praesepe cluster in Cancer (a big clump of stars, basically), and the Orion nebula (a dim fuzzy patch around a couple of stars). I found Castor and Pollux and managed to locate and split up Mizar and Alcor too. M31 was too low to the horizon to spot though.
Is there anything else worth seeing in the northern hemisphere sky nowadays? I spent most of the time looking west, in the general direction of Orion. I didn't spot much in the eastern sky though - is there anything interesting there too see? (by which I mean clusters, nebulae, galaxies, multiple stars that can be split up, etc).