by Matthew Marcus
The best I could find was the shadow of some cylindrical structure about 4' high, which left me exposed to only one direct beam. With this sort of environment, it wasn't worth it to pull out the C8, so I tried it with the Ranger at 32x and 100x, with and without a Lumicon Deep-Sky filter. No luck. I suspect that something in my optics is too dirty and covered up the real nebula with a fake reflection nebula.
I tried removing the diagonal, figuring that it's one more optical element to scatter light, but I didn't have the out-focus needed. It was about 12:30, so Saturn was high in the sky. I didn't try estimating a limiting magnitude.
At least the seeing was decent. Cassini showed up nicely and the moons were sharp.