Saturday 07/05/11 trans 8-10 seeing 8-10
16" f 4.5 eyepieces 17 mm type 4 nagler,9mm TMB,6MM Radian,2xbarlow O111,UHC filters
I spent some considerable time trying to tease every detail out of this object.
17mm nagler,x107mag Small blue fuzzy spot at the western point of a faint asterism of stars shaped like a figure seven,averted vision made this object more obvious,as with a lot of planetaries seems to disappear when viewed directly.
O111 filter seemed to not make much difference UHC seemed to make it brighter.
Using a 2x barlow,x215mag some detail was noted,
elongated north to south with three brighter knotts and some dark spaces in between,O111 showed more detail with the bright knotts more defined,UHC was also an improvement on the unfiltered view.
6mm Radian x304 mag showed the spindle shape as seen in Les Dalrymple's article in the May edition of AS&T
6mm Radian plus 2x Barlow x604 mag +O111 filter,
even though fuzzy a lot more detail was observed with the spindle shape confirmed, with a fourth nebulas spot seen on the north western edge and the dark spaces more pronounced
UHC also helped .
An image of approximately what I observed can be seen
here
I had attempted to observe this object on the sixth of this month but the seeing was not that great and I failed to find it as in low mag it is star like.
Cheers
PS A dark hood also helped to get the maximum detail out of the object.