Monday, September 2, 2013

Gamma Ophiuchi neighborhood

Another cool, clear night in the Ozarks with no moon.  It was a bit humid and dew was falling but I thought I should take advantage of the night as there won't be too many of them left before we hit the road again and/or the moon comes back out.  I saw Ophiuchus high in the south so I thought I'd revisit Gamma Ophiuchi's neighborhood with the 8" dob.  IC4665 was nice in binocs the other night so I snagged it first after setting up.  Hauling out the dob and assorted paraphernalia is sure harder than grabbing 7x50's and a star chart!  At least it doesn't need alignment.  The open cluster is a bright one that I can just make out unaided resting above Beta Oph.  At first glance it looks like a ring of fairly bright 9 blue stars with a kind of fish hook appendage of 4 more blue stars, and a central star in the ring that goes out when I look right at it.After staring at it for awhile I began to notice that the fish hook closed on itself with two more very dim stars into a kind of tear drop shape with HD161603 at the pointy end of the drop.  Inside the drop were several other very dim stars including a mag 12 GSC-424-0179!  That has to be one of the dimmest stars I've seen.
Emboldened, I next went after Collinder 350, another open cluster in the Gamma Oph neighborhood.  It looked nice in my 25mm ep and I explored some of the dimmer groups of stars.I thought I might have found an asteroid near SAO122777 but after checking another star chart it appears to have been just another star. Finally I went after globular cluster NGC6426.  I wasn't able to verify it for certain but I believe I caught a glimpse of a faint fuzzy where it should have been.  Not bad for a mag 13 surface brightness!  I'll have to go after a brighter globular next time just to satisfy my delight in finding these curious objects.
It eventually got too dewey for good viewing so I decided to quit for the night and feed the coons.

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