open clusters

[Googinhiem]

I have a very hard time locating open clusters. I have an 8x50 RACI finderscope and lots of times the cluster just kind of blends in to the background stars especially when I'm at a dark site.  Any advice would be welcome,  I have found several just using a wide fov eyepiece and scanning the area but there must be a more efficient way lol. Thank you! 

[rockystar]

I know DSOs normally call for dark skies,  but I've found that lighter skies help with OCs. I spent an evening at home around Cassiopeia and most of them were quite obvious.

With dark skies there are almost too many stars and they just bend in 

[billyharris72]

Open clusters can be a very mixed bag. I personally find they fall into three main groups:

1) Big and bright (Pleiades, Beehive, Double Cluster). These are easy to find, with scope or the naked eye. Not many of them.

2) Smaller and dimmer, but dense and rich. The Auriga clusters (esp M37) or M11 come to mind. If the sky is reasomably dark you should get these as a fuzzy smudge in the finder. Given a half decent sky they can look spectacular in the eyepiece. Bad light pollution (NELM 4 or worse) and you might as well forget it.

3) Not especially big or bright, quite diffuse with the stars spread out. These are the ones I struggle with, especially if their surroundings are also quite rich. In many cases they just blend into the background. Sometimes, though, there will lots of very faint stars spread through the brighter ones, but these can be harder to pick up. Again, a dark sky helps. In mediocre skies I find these to be quite unrewarding though; just not much to see.

As for finding them, sounds to me like you have trhe right approach. The Sky and Telescope atlas and a RACI finder should get you on the right track, but scanning with a wide field ep is often the last part of the puzzle.

Billy.

[mystyco]

With your current setup your best bet is to use wide fov eyepieces and try to locate the brighter ones.

[iPeace]

If I can't find something by scanning, I resort to star hopping - moving from one positively identified star to another - until I'm sure the scope is pointing at the cluster I want to see.

If it's not immediately obvious, I give it a few minutes - and perhaps some averted vision - to "appear". If it doesn't, well, I'm sure I'll have better luck some other time.

[domstar]

If an open cluster is too far away from a bright star to easily star hop, then I might get the binoculars out to give me a better idea of where it is. If I can find it in binoculars then I can see where I've been going wrong with the telescope.