by Ron Bhanukitsiri
Like a great box office hit movie, all of the attentions went to the principal stars and the supporting actors and actresses are not even noticed :-(. This is true of Hercules and Lyra, with everyone raving at the good looks of M13 and the finesse of the M57 ;-). The TV-102 Light Cup being a contrarian ;-) prefers an interview with the more "mundane" stars; no not movie stars! NGC 6791 an OC in Lyra and NGC 6210 an PN in Hercules, that is ;-).
The TV-102 Light Cup picked NGC 6791 because it was on the RASC challenge list with a note of a minimum of 8-10 inch aperture to detect. Ok, we shall see. A small dim circular glow at 22x, near a group of 3 dim stars that form a line. Had to recheck the chart to be make sure I can tag "you're it" ;-). If I didn't have a detail chart, I could have easily pass by without noticing! At 30x, the dim glow makes the cluster looked more like a nebula or an unresolved dim GC. At 73x (12mm TV Radian), it is still dim and I counted about 10 dim stars resolved embedded in the background glow of seemingly unresolved stars. The OC seems to be helmed in by the following stars GSC 3134:1708, GSC 3134:1093 and GSC 3134:1847, the later being part of 3 stars that formed a line asterism. Best view at 110x (8mm Radian) and shape is roughly round. Dimmer at 146x (6mm Radian). Afterward, I did some research and found this stunning photo of the OC:
http://www.homestead.com/mstecker/ngc6791.html
I thought OC is usually a group of young stars, but this OC is over 7 billion years old! There are supposed to be about 300 stars in the OC with the brightest being 13th magnitude. No wonder the cluster looked so dim with nebulous glow through my 4" TV-102 Light Cup. Definitely worth a revisit to look for those red giants in the pictures. Then the Everbrite diagonal strucked me in the head. The Light Cup explanined *its* theory of cosmology to me. "OC with young stars are full of energy and are thus bright. OC with old stars are very dim because they're getting near the astro cemetery." Ah, it most certainly sounds logical ;-)! So look at the RASC Deep Sky Challenge Object list; there are hidden gems in there! The Light Cup was very delighted indeed to have napped this 8-inch challenge object ;-). (LM=5.7)
With Hercules nearly overhead, TV-102 Light Cup did *not* interview Kevin Sorbo (you know the guy that play Hercules in the TV series), but rather NGC 6210, alias "Turtle Nebula" ;-). I found this object on the Skyhound website (many fun objects were found there). It was masquering as a bright star and forms a triangle with the star SAO 84574 and a yellowish star SAO 84572 at 22x and 30x. With the PN killer 8mm TV Radian (110x), the "star" was exploded into PN, looking like an unfocus disc and appeared green. Definitely green color at 146x. The disc is still quite small at 176x and alas tonight the seeing did not support high power. No central star seen nor the "ansae?" observed. There's definitely gonna be a follow-up interview with the Turtle on steady seeing night! Look at this great picture on the Skyhound website. (LM=5.8)
http://www.skyhound.com/sh/skyhound.html
Thus, the behind-the-screen Light Wars interview continue...