I got the chance to go out to our club’s dark sky site near Pilot Mountain last night. I took the 10″ dob with me to look at NGC 6819. I have been wanting to revisit this cluster since my observation of it with the 4″ TV102 refractor.
It was a beautiful night, clear and cool, about 70 degrees Fahrenheit, a gentil breeze of only 1 to 3 miles per hour. The Milky Way was bright for this site and visible from Sagittarius all the way almost to Cassiopeia. I could even see the riff in its glow. As nice as it was the naked eye limiting magnitude was still only 5.4 to 5.6 and the seeing would only allow moderate high magnification.
I found this cluster using my 24mm Panoptic eyepiece giving a magnification of 50x, it looked like a small almost round gray spot in a rich star field. I ended up using my 10mm Radian eyepiece for a magnification of 120x to make the sketch. There were about 22 stars visible over the gray haze. These stars were grouped into basically two diverging lines over the haze, which was approximately 5 to 6 arc minutes in diameter. More magnification is needed to resolve the haze and that will have to be done another night.
buddybarbee 