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I have observed 5189 several times before. However, this is the first time I have spent a lot of time on it. I spent about 1 hour on it tonight. I used our 8" F6 stringscope Dob. Both seeing and transparency were down tonight, perhaps 5/10 for both. Also humidity was quite high with significant dew on the scope after 1 hour.
I was not sure what sort of view I would get, not only due to the seeing but also as 5189 was well past the zenith and descending into the light glow from a couple of major shopping centres.
I used a 32mm "finder" eyepiece to locate it, which was fairly easy as it is quite bright and located between 2 stars mag 6 & 7.5there. In the "finder" eyepiece (38X) it appeared as a small elongated, almost rectangular, patch of light. As it is a fairly bright PN and should take magnification well, I changed eyepieces to 212X. At this magnification I could see a main bar of nebulosity running E-W. At the East end of this bar it broadens out into a round patch twice as thick as the bar and offset to the South. The West end of the bar appears to terminate in a short hook to the North. I could easily see a single star offset from centre to the West. I assume this is the mag 11 star. Using averted vision there were hints of additional star/s although they were so tenuous it could have been my imagination.
NOTE I could easily have got this orientation WRONG as I have never bothered to learn the orientation of the cardinal points versus direction of movement in the eyepiece. I have assumed the Western side is the "leading side". I hope someone will let me know if I have got it wrong.
I then tried using a prism to see if I could detect the stars. Unfortunately there was too much stray light for this to work well although I could make out the image of the nebulosity in the prism. This will have to wait for a deep sky night.
I kept the same magnification and added a UHC filter. The contrast increased (and the mag 11 star virtually disappeared)and I now noticed with averted vision (particularly when gently moving the scope) the central bar appeared to be surrounded by an oval haze only slightly longer than the central bar and width about 3/4 of the length. While the contrast had increased I could not notice much additional detail in the way of structure in the central bar.
In summary a fascinating object.
Cheers,
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