nebulae - what can I see with an 8 inch dob?

[Charon]

How do you work out the light pollution on Stellarium? I have one street light a couple of hundred yards away from me and that is it. Have a small town to my North West approx 5 miles away but that shows only three or four halogen type lights. So what setting would you say I could set into Stellarium?

[Stu]

Not sure how that works but it's probably more likely to be a case of seeing what the faintest star that you can see and checking the magnitude on stellarium. That will give you your limiting magnitude and should let you set Stellarium correctly

Stu

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[coffee_prince]

On stellarium press f4, there is a light pollution option. I put mine on 8 or 7 depending on how good the night is (very poor seeing to be fair I wish I waqs 3-4 or something!).

My pollutions is bad, so usually I can see the big constellations only, like ursor major, cygnus etc, and on better day I wil be able to see all the stars in aquila sometimes there is one or two missing), and I adjust the settings so it looks like what I can see with the naked eye.

On the nebulae tab I move it up until only the brightest are located, but the ring nebuae doesn't show up sometimes but its definitely one of the easier to see despite it being "less bright"