Cygnus Wide-field

[Davesellars]

Well, it after my eldest daughter's birthday of 4 years. I'd been up pretty much 2 nights running making cake and stuff.. lots of cake for lots of children.  I was thoroughly knackered and got in a couple of hours sleep early until 10:30pm. Slightly refreshed but still a bit "punch-drunk" after the day's activities my daughter was amazingly still up and awake and so I offered to show her the sky with her little dob as it had just about got dark.

As the bedroom is North East facing we had a good view of Cygnus and this dense Milky Way region. I stuck in a 25mm Plossl and we scanned around for a while with my daughter. The little dob is a about perfect sitting on the floor it's just high enough for her to comfortable look through the eyepiece bending down to it. Ideally it wants to be ~ 10cm higher I'll have to experiment a bit. She had some fun looking through the eyepiece and seems to be getting the hang of it now although there weren't any real obvious objects to show her in this area of the sky, lots of stars are good. 

Once she was tucked up in bed and I'd refreshed it was past midnight and it was now properly dark. I did very briefly consider going out but decided that would not be a very sensible thing to do. It was so clear though! However, we have 3 nights where the forecast is giving clear nights coming so I just decided for a quick session with the 120ST. I had some eyepieces that I'd not used since purchasing since purchasing (17.3mm Delos & 7mm Pentax) so thought t give them a go and see how they do in a fast frac.

First... I popped in the 28mm ES Maxvision. Great EP with this scope and seems almost perfectly corrected to the optics giving a 3.2 degree FOV with only 21x magnification it's perfect for scanning around taking in the MW. I then centred on the North American Nebula switched to the ES68 24mm so I could try out a couple of filters.

I had the area completely dark so was decently dark adapted as have a black out draped over the window which was covering about 95% of any external light. This makes a massive difference to make out fainter stuff even though the limiting magnitude is approx 4.2 here.

I tried the Astronomik OIII and the Explore Scientific HBeta. I tried also with the 32mm Baader Plossl and still nothing. The sky is far too light at 4.2 mag limiting but this is a tough nebula so I wasn't really expecting anything from this one.

On to the Veil. This is considerably a bright object than the NaN, but still very easily washed out. The 24mm ES68 and the Astronomik OIII pulled out the Eastern Veil quite easily while the Western was a much more difficult object requiring some averted vision to make out the main nebulous region running through 52 Cyg. I have found this before though that the Eastern section (to me) always seems to be easier. However, the nebula was far from good viewing and amazing really to see the difference it makes having approx 1 magnitude more limiting at my normal observation site. There with the same scope I remember real structure to the nebula rather than an undefined grey area.  Dark sky wins - Filters can show you stuff in LP which would be otherwise be impossible to see but don't expect much at all... Is definitely the mantra given and is very true.

I popped in my Pentax 7mm which gave 85x - This was probably getting for the max seeing given the turbulence of air however the view was pretty much steady. Lovely points of light, colour and perfectly corrected. Still had perfect points of light right to the very edge. Once I'd set the eye-guard to the correct height this was a very comfortable eyepiece to use. Very impressed and I think this will get lots of use with all my scopes.

The 17.3mm Delos was next. Again perfectly corrected with this scope (which is known for its field curvature). The next test will be with the 12" dob. This eyepiece really presented a wonderful view with 2 degrees FOV and 34x magnification. It seemed to be the sweet spot of contrast and power showing a huge amount of stars in the view scanning around the MW.

I kept the Delos in for a bit and found a plethora of open clusters and then packed up since it was getting on and a school night. Save my energy and all... 

Hopefully tonight - back to galaxies and proper faint stuff with the dob!

[Littleguy80]

I got my first look at the Veil with the same eyepiece/filter combination that you used. LP is moderate from my garden and I also struggled to pick out details. I'm going to have to find some dark skies for a proper look at it!