16 Cygni & Blinking Planetary

[Knighty2112]

Just finished a quick 30 minute session. The plan for tonight apart from some brief observations of Jupiter and Saturn earlier on in the evening, was to bag double star 16 Cygni, and the Blinking planetary nebula NGC6826. These two lie close to each other, so I worked out that I should be able to grab both in my 5mm Celestron Duo EP at the same time. After setting up my Sabre mount and my AA Starwave Ascent 80 ED ‘frac at 22:15 I realised that these two targets where pretty much at zenith, which due to the location of where I was viewing to dodge the street lamps it made it very awkward to view through the finder viewfinder well at this angle. But after about 5 mins getting in the right area, and sweeping around I got the likely candidate for 16 Cygni in view. Both pretty much matched at mag 6, I was sure this was the double. So carefully moving the double to the left side of my view I reckoned that NGC6826 should blink into view by moving to the right a little as viewed from my EP, and hey presto at the 2 o’clock position in the EP it did indeed blink into view. I slotted in my 8mm Duo EP which gave a nicer view to look at both in the fov also.

After admiring the view for about 15 mins or so, I thought I’d finish off the brief session having a scout for the dumbell nebula, which I’d tried and failed with the other night. This was in a better place to observe from, so swung into the general area with my finder and nosied around a minute or so & M27 sprung into view in my 8mm EP. It stood out pretty well considering I wasn’t using any filter, and the sky wasn’t at its darkest yet still.

Would have liked to stay out longer for the session, but with work beckoning tomorrow I called it a night at 22:50. It was nice to see some old friends again up there, no matter how briefly!