As of late June, 1998, I have found over 160 objects in my Herschel-400 survey with Refractor Red, my fluorescent 55 mm Vixen fluorite refractor. I promised not to bore you with long lists of checked NGC numbers, but after I had logged all the list objects from 10:00 through 12:59 hours of right ascension, and all the southerly ones in the next two hours east, I stopped my manic observing of things that were about to disappear into the evening twilight, and followed whim and curiosity. Several people had mentioned two Herschel-400 objects as being particularly tough, and they were both well placed at this time of year, so on a good recent night at Fremont Peak State Park, I looked for NGC 6118 and NGC 6540.

The comments I received had prompted me to download on-line images of both objects from the Deep Sky Survey. NGC 6118 looked like a garden-variety obliquely-viewed spiral galaxy; NGC 6540 was more mystifying, as we shall see. I did not have the images with me when I observed -- I had looked at them on my workstation a few days before.

The night of 26 June, 1998, was indeed good. Uncommonly transparent sky combined with an incomplete layer of fog over the coastal plain from Santa Cruz to Monterey, California, to make the high sky quite dark. The North American Nebula was an easy naked-eye object, so much so that I could detect the "Gulf of Mexico" within it.

NGC 6118 lies in eastern end Serpens Caput, near a sixth-magnitude star (which is actually in Ophiuchus), about two degrees south of the celestial equator. That star was visible to the naked eye, and even if it hadn't been, nearby lambda, epsilon, and delta Ophiuchi made the field easy to locate. I observed with two eyepieces, alternating between a 12 mm Brandon (37x) and a 20 mm Meade Research Grade Erfle (22x). I used the _Millennium_Star_Atlas_, which shows plenty of nearby stars, so the precise location of the object was not in doubt.

With each of the eyepieces, I saw a faint, diffuse, and not very centrally concentrated glow, popping in and out at the limit of averted vision, at the charted position. Jiggling the telescope, or moving it slightly with the slow motions, helped a bit. The glow was detectable only ten or twenty percent of the time, but it kept reappearing at the same place, and I do not see similar fluctuations of intensity at random places in such fields, so I logged it.

Make no mistake -- this was a very tough object, certainly the toughest so far in my Herschel-400 survey with Refractor Red. When I say "detection", I mean no more than that. NGC 6118 would have gone unnoticed had I not known in advance exactly where to look, or had I not been patiently willing to pull every trick in my book to find it. I suspect that the root of the difficulty is that the object does not have nearly as large a central concentration to its brightness as do most galaxies; such a bright core to an image seems to draw the eye, and give the brain a reference point for locating the fainter, outer periphery of the object. Or so I would conjecture.

Since I had essentially an equally good view at 22x (2.5 mm exit pupil) and 37x (1.5 mm exit pupil), I suspect that an interim magnification -- perhaps with a 2 mm exit pupil -- might have been best for that object on that night. Unfortunately, I had only brought a handful of eyepieces, and did not have one available.

On the next evening I was at Fremont Peak again, this time with my Meade 5-inch refractor (model 127 ED). Sky conditions were similar, so I looked for NGC 6118 in the larger telescope, using 36x (Orion 32 mm Sirius Plossl) -- a magnification very similar to one of the ones I had used with Refractor Red. The object was much easier -- with five times the light grasp, that's no surprise -- and I was able to confirm the appearance that I had seen in the smaller instrument.

NGC 6540, located just off the spout of the Sagittarius "Teapot", is something of a puzzle. The visual description from the original catalog is a faint, sparse, open cluster which is relatively small in angular size. Yet what _Millennium_ plots is a ten-arc-minute globular. What I saw with the 12 mm Brandon in Refractor Red (37x) was a six or seven arc-minute unresolved circular glow, just noticeably brighter than the background (which was pretty bright -- this object is in the Sagittarius Milky Way, after all), with a smaller, brighter core superimposed. The core might have been one or two arc-minutes in diameter, it was unresolved, and it did not appear to have diffuse edges. The entire apparition was dead on the atlas position for NGC 6540, and was notably easier than NGC 6118.

The large patch was what one would expect of an unresolved, highly obscured, globular cluster. The small core might have been an association of some of its brighter members, or a small foreground open cluster, or a chance micro-asterism of unrelated stars.

This appearance and interpretation are consistent with the Deep Sky Survey plate of NGC 6540, except that that image is deep enough that the "big glow" -- which is at least partly resolved into stars -- is very hard to detect against the surrounding Milky Way background. The DSS image showed the glow larger than I saw it. The image also featured a couple of groups of brighter stars against the larger object; their aggregate brightness likely comprised my "small core".

There is a hill at the south end of the part of Fremont Peak where I set up my Meade 127 the next night. It blocked NGC 6540 from the larger instrument.