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Messier 7 and friends
Well, a brief window of opportunity between clouds saw my scope out for long enough to actually observe. I thought I'dhave a go at the observing challenge. The seeing was good and transparency poor and going for galaxies and fainter objects was pointless. With Scorpius near zenith, Alex's challenge of teasing apart M& and it's friends seemed worth a go. Here is the report.
Scope 16" tri-dob
Charts Uranometria
135x In observing this cluster it is easy to get fixed on the very bright central 25 or so stars which spill out beyond the 40’ FOV.These bright stars form a N-S line to the east, a flatted triangle to the west and others are distributed in many interesting asterisms between. NGC 6453 (GC) forms the western apex of a 30’ per side equilateral triangle with 2 bright stars at the NW edge of the central group of M7. 6453 is a 4’ dia bright unresolved GC with a high degree of concentration and an overlaid triangular asterism. 30’ SW of 6453 is NGC 6444, denoted as a star cloud in Uranometria. It consists of 100+ fainter stars arranged in a 15’ E-W ridge (crossed by several shorter N-S lines of stars). At the western end of the ridge a 15’ ridge of stars projects to the north. Further to the west is a dense haze of background stars. 7’ NE of 6453 is a small concentration of stars which is not marked in Uranometria.
Also observed but with insufficient time for notes were NGC 5455 (star cloud) 6437 (star cloud) 6421 (star cloud) Trumpler 30 (OC) and Barnard dark nebulae 286 & 287
With a good chart this is a fascinating area of sky to observe.
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