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Hi Craig & All,
Thanks for taking the time Craig to type up these notes and share them with the rest of us. It can feel a bit daunting to do this first time but you've done really well.
Suggest (after you have found and centred them) using a bit more magnification on the G.Cs to darken the background and make resolving the clusters a bit easier.
M14 is an interesting object that is really stuck out in the middle of nowhere -- hard to hop to. It is also fairly distant and obsured (by galactic gas & dust) somewhat making it hard to resolve. I think the extent of the obscuration is about 2.5 magnitudes. The brightest stars start around the mag 14 mark so unless you observe under dark skies and use some magnification it won't resolve well. It is somewhat larger than average G.C with an absolute magnitude of -9.12 and probably has more than a half-million member stars. In structure, it looks a lot like Omega Centauri (NGC 5139). It is one of the few GC's to host a nova that was discovered many years after the event in a photograph taken by Helen Sawyer-Hogg.
Best,
Les D
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