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My first view of the helix is something I'll never forget - I was lying on my back on the bonnet of a mates car, scanning the sky overhead with bino's. I was really just killing time and taking a break from the scope, there were three of us and a C8 at a dark site outside my home town of Glen Innes. The darkest skies you could imagine.
Just randomly scanning across the sky, admiring the view, when suddenly ... there was this *huge* nebula! I guess it was pretty faint, but I remember it as being bright, probably my memory playing tricks. We all took turns to look at it with the binoculars, and we were all stunned that there was this large structure just there in reach of low power.
Of course it wasn't long before the star charts came out and we found that we were looking at the helix nebula.
This would have been in around 1984, just afte I'd finished high school.
Bird
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