22.07.12 ( anything will do !)

[rory]

i like others made no real plan for this session, just plonk the scope out and as soon as i could see a star ( vega won the race) that was good enough for me. even my notes were rough at best ! but all that matters was there were stars out dancing i wasnt going to miss the party tonight

so after a star test on vega i started a general mooch around the sky but with the sky still holding a bit of sunlight there wasnt much a do,so i just sat a watched the sky darken in my own thoughts for about 15/20 minutes. once it was dark enough to start some hunting i thought the best bet was open clusters as generally easier to view under twilight than other objects. so what do i go to first ? m71 ( g/c) in sagitta ! why , well i could see the constellation's arrow shape easily and thought it would be a start while waiting for other constellations to show thier shape.

as susspected ,due to light skies m71 wasnt up to much , a small mottled blur, higher mag didn't help.so i went with my initial plan of a open cluster and found m29 in cygnus. a magnitude 6.6 fairly tight cluster. i spent a while with this and tried a sketch. i could make out four brightest stars forming a square (ish) witha couple of dimmer stars going s-s-w and s-s-e, making the square to have legs i suppose .dont know why but it's shape reminded me of a space invader from the original arcade game at x100 .even after spending twenty minutes with this cluster and drawing it out i couldnt make out any dimmer stars within.

next was a new one for me, m26 o/c in scutum mag 8. my rough notes simply states " small o/c" ! so not much to go on, but again i managed a quick sketch, about ten minutes at x 100 again.

this small cluster made a miniture cross with the four brightest stars i could see. with two small arcs of very dim stars arcing down from it. small but quite enjoyable,id like to see that again under a darker sky.

finished the night with m27 in vulpecula. i was ataken back how bright this stood out even in summer skies.very ghostly appearance. i could see the dumbell shape or applecore as i preffer to call it. but with the 200mm appeture i could make out a whole sphere shape with the core inside, i didnt get that with my old 90mm frac. very impressive. so another quick sketch was on the cards before pack up time. by this time it was nearly 1.30 and i had work so had to call it a night. but very enjoyable couple of hours.

[Double Kick Drum]

Nice to see the extra aperture bringing out more detail (especially M27).

I failed to even find M26 with binoculars but will return to spend a bit more time on it with the scope.

Thanks for sharing.