NGC 6819 & NGC 6811

[josefk]

I had a lovely evening on the 14th September slowly rambling about with a friendly little scope, looking for new open clusters up in Cygnus. A lovely evening till i found out this morning that Jupiter was the main show (but much later in the evening after i had gone to bed) and would have rewarded more patience to see out the cloud i had around midnight. Hey oh!

Here is NGC 6811 with a Struve system (STTA 187) nearby. I knew STTA was a "double" at the time but my sketch has also brought me the C component that i didn't know about in the moment of the observation. If i had been more careful with my plotting i may have won a D component too, trailing behind these three a little way.

 

NGC 6811 was nice but the Open Cluster below, NGC 6819, was nicer. Very rewarding to averted vision and patience (at this aperture). 

 

Last night was first light for a new 4.7mm Ethos EP bought at IAS yesterday. I've bought it for the extended AFOV and more drift time with undriven mounts but my plotting of the field for NGC 6819 has highlighted an issue i will have to get my head round. Typically i look for and  plot one or two bright stars near the field stop to kind of "fix" the field and that i can keep resetting my scope view too as i sketch, the sky drifts, I sketch, the sky drifts etc...

This morning comparing and checking against SSP i can see the 110-degree AFOV (and in particular moving my head around the field stop to see it) has caused me to badly capture the spatial relationships of the brighter stars. Basically i have focussed on a much smaller area of the field than the EP was showing in reality. I'll have to have a think about how to calibrate for this.

Has anyone else found the higher powered Ethos and the expansive star fields they can show to also be a bit disorienting when it comes to sketching or star-hopping?

Cheers

[SwiMatt]

Nice work @josefk. Both sketches look like the objects would be very rewarding - not only NGC 6819