What can you see with a 60mm telescope?

Like every other geek, I love astronomy and most things related to space. I never truly pursued this topic, apart from the odd article on NGS, but now I get to use a telescope on the weekends. The telescope ain't that much, but it ain't that bad either. It's a 60mm Konus, with equatorial mount and a motor (which basically means I can point at an object, turn on the motor and the motor will make up for Earth's rotation). One of the things I would like to know is what can you see with such a telescope. Oddly enough, I still wasn't able to find a comprehensive list on the net... so here's what I was able to see so far: (I've only used the telescope 3 times, so I hope the list will grow in the future!)

• Moon: Excellent view, great contrast on the craters. I plan to look at it with a lot more detail.
• Saturn: I was able to see the rings without a problem. I still wasn't able to see the Cassini Division, but I'll keep trying. I was able to see a bit of the texture of the planet, but it's mostly a small white ball. I was also able to see one of the moons of Saturn (Dione, I believe).
• Mars: I've seen it without much detail, because right now it is way up in the sky and therefore a bit uncomfortable to watch. Still, it is rather small, and the only detail I was able to see was that it was only partly lit by the Sun.
• Orion Nebula: You can see the trapezium cluster without a problem, as well as the nearer 3 stars. But the nebula itself is rather faint, and you can only see the brightest part. And even that is only a small blur.

Next, I plan to see the Sun (I'll need to buy a filter), Jupiter and some other Messier objects. (I'd really like to see the Whirlpool Galaxy, but I still wasn't able to spot it... don't even know if it is visible with my telescope!)

Beryl: Desktop Fireworks

If you want to make your Ubuntu desktop really come to live, Beryl is the answer. It's an accelerated OpenGL desktop manager that gives you a lot of bells and whistles visual feedback on your window manager operations. Installing is not as simple as you might wish, but it isn't too hard either. On the Beryl wiki there's an entry on how to install Beryl on Ubuntu and you can basically follow that. The only notes I have on the installations steps are: I had an error message while starting Beryl. As a consequence I had no window manager! The message was:

beryl: No GLXFBConfig for depth 32

After doing some searches on the web I found a post that gave a solution to this problem. Just add the following to "Device" section on your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:

Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"

Also I skipped the entire "Configuring Beryl" section and just added beryl-manager to my Startup Programs in System > Preferences > Sessions Next you have to configure Beryl. There's a ton of options, animations, keyboard shortcuts, themes, etc, etc that you can tweak with to make your desktop look exactly like you want it to! And if you have a bit of patience and 28Mb of spare memory to run Beryl, it's really worth the trouble.