Knocked out M2 and M15

I had been keeping tabs on the skies all night. The evening hours were fairly clear, but by the time I wanted to check on Omega Centauri, clouds had taken over. By 2am, however, things were fairly clear again. By 3am, I was eyeballing the door. At 4am, I was outside, scanning the sky and getting accustomed to my surroundings.

I saw Deneb to the north and the Moon setting in the southern sky. From there, I noticed Vega, so I briefly visited the Ring Nebula for the heck of it. For those who care, even in a moonlit sky, a Zhumell Urban Sky Filter will pick up your galaxies and a UHC filter will help with nebulae, like the Ring and the Owl.

I glanced at SkySafari to check on objects I could find at that hour and noticed both M2 and M15 were within reach. M72 and M73 were in the eastern sky and I not only have pine trees to contend with in that direction, but the skyglow from Shreveport. I would consider myself lucky to find M2 and M15.

I immediately got my bearings relative to Altair and a visible star well below it. That star turned out to be Enif in Pegasus. Instead of going for M2, I went for M15, seeing as how it was just above Enif. M15 really stood out inside a triangle of stars. I barlowed my 8mm eyepiece and went in for the kill. I could make out a few central stars, but it wasn’t nearly as impressive as much larger globular clusters out there.

The next goal was to navigate from Enif to M2. It proved to be somewhat more difficult than I expected, but after bouncing back and forth about three times, I found it. M2 was about the same size as M15, but it didn’t have nearly the same level of detail in the barlowed 8mm, so I backed off and went with a barlowed 13mm. Then I could make out some more definition. Still, like M15, M2 did not impress me.

After that, I went looking for M72 and M73, but I couldn’t find either one. M73 is definitely going to be the more difficult of the two because I think it is a very tiny open cluster. M72, however, may be easier if I could just locate the right group of stars to scan. Searching for M72 reminded me of looking for M71, so I tried my Urban Sky filter to bring out some contrast, but that didn’t help in the long run. I eventually gave up because daylight was already on its way.

Still, not bad for such a short outing.