M56 and the shuttle

[iamjulian]

I started last night at 8.34pm. Cristal clear sky, warm orange glow in West and getting darker in the East. Jupiter and a handful of the brighter stars were the only things visible. Then drifting into view came two bright 'stars'. The space shuttle being chased by the international space station. Wow. Made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. What a sight.

I set the scope up shortly afterwards and at 9.30pm headed out for an hour's observing. Planned targets were M31, M32, M13 and if I was feeling lucky, M57. The moon was low in the East and being blocked by some rooftops, so although it wasn't anything like dark, all the constellations were clear so I aimed at Andromeda. Nice and clear, with M32 just about visible too. Still no sign of M110, I'll have to wait for a darker sky.

Next I swung around to M13, which I had seen for the first time last week during a full moon. The moon was up again now, though not as bright as last week. It didn't take me too long to find the globular cluster at 30x and once centred I jumped to 150x and got a lovely clear view without averted vision, the outer stars clear points of light. This thing is going to look amazing on a dark night.

Feeling confident I headed up to Vega to begin the search for M57. I swapped to the red dot finder last week but after last night I can tell you I will be switching back to the magnified finder with the cross hair. I find it much easier to use. Back to M57. During the fruitless search(!) I found a really red star. Unlike any other I have seen. I tried to find it this morning on Stellarium but without success. If you have Vega at the south west of your eyepiece (25mm on my 6" reflector, 52 degree apparent field of view, so about 1.7 degrees!?), the star is at the north east edge. It is pretty faint - I'm not much good at estimating magnitudes yet - but my best colour description would be dark copper red. Quite distinctive.

And then I spotted a faint fuzzy. I tried to get more detail with various eyepiece and barlow combinations, but no sign of the ring that would make it M57. I looked back through the finder and realised I had drifted more towards Albireo. It was M56, another globular cluster. Couldn't see any detail but another smudge to add to my collection.

[Doc]

A wonderful read Julian and well done on finding all those Messiers.

You need a Messier count in your sig

Take a look here for some more ideas.

http://stargazerslounge.com/primers-tutorials/81493-object-list-indexed-constellation.html

[Talitha]

Well done Julian, and thanks for a very pleasant read. I think the red star you saw might have been T Lyra, It's almost 2 degrees SW of Vega at RA 18h32m // Dec +36°59'56".

My SkyTools program includes a column with 'Photometry' data, and T Lyra's B-V is 5.46. No idea what any of that is , but i've noticed that anything above a 3.0 seems to be more reddish than other stars, and 5.46 is one of the highest numbers i've seen. Nice catch!