My First Messier Object (M13)

[blueroom]

Last night I had lovely clear skies and decided to look for M13 after reading about in Turn Left At Orion.

It was much harder than I thought and after 30 mins of failure I got the iPad out which helped greatly. Suddenly I found a faint smudge in the sky with my 25mm EP, I then put in my 8mm BST and I had that WOW moment! It was still quite faint but I could easily see a round blob with hundreds if not thousands of tiny little stars.

Would a nebular filter improve the view?

M13 is my first proper Messier object (if I exclude the Orion nebular & the Pleiades)

[Stargazer_00]

Hi,

M13 is still my favorite DSO after 2 full seasons. Love it, cant wait for it to come up and miss it when it's gone.

A nebula filter wont help on this one at all as it's a cluster of stars. The best thing for it is bigger apertures and darker skies. Finding the right magnification as well. My 10" resolves central starts on M13 very well, I'd love to see it through a bigger aperture.

A constrast boosting filter might help, like a baade neodynium but not as much as dark skies would.

The good news is there are tons of good globs out there to look at Galaxies dont perform so well from my urban environment so my pleasure comes from globs and open clusters mostly. Im just starting to open up nebulas so I dont know if these will be viable to urban skies or not. I suspect not but I invested in a UHC filter anyway for when I do get to dark skies.