Today is the first clear evening since I got my binoculars. Great Googly Moogly on a Stick!! It’s true what they say in the books, you know, Jupiter really is a planet. I can actually tell! If you can see the moon from your window you’ll be able to see it too; it’s just to the moon’s right, by far the brightest point-of-light in that area of sky. I can only see Saturn by standing in the middle of the garden, which isn’t overly conducive to steady viewing, but I can definitely make out a sphere and I think I can faintly see the rings. I may well be fooling myself on that one, though. Mars becomes a lot more orangy, but I can’t make out any particular shape, not without a tripod or something, anyway. The Pleiades are perhaps the second most spectacular change: they suddenly turn from a grey blob into a cluster of very bright stars. Bizarrely it took me a while to actually look at the moon, but the extra detail is stunning, I spent ages just looking at impact craters. Patches of sky where nothing is apparent to the naked eye suddenly have a fair few stars; it should be even more pronounced later. All in all, the binoculars were definitely money well spent.