[Weltevreden SA (Dana)]

John, by itself 6380 by itself is not all that hard to spot, but it's highly obscured by galactic extinction, so its listed visual mag of 11.1 is actually a surface brightness of 18.0. This is made much worse by a distracting 10.6 mag field star nearly on its so. edge. Even so, once I finally spotted it, I now see it easily on any decent night in a 150mm MK66 Mk at 60x, appearing like a slight cometary or nebular flare right next to the star. It's easier in a 180mm scope at 170x and now I use it as a test for transparency.

Andrew gave good chart instructions. Here are some tips: the bright star in 'NGC locator 1' attached is HD 159433 at vmag 4.3. Just SW (at 4:30 in the image) is a 4-star asterism that looks a bit like the head of Draco. Follow the two faintest stars directly towards 4:30 to HD 159073, the distracting mag 10.6 star. Visually the Draco head is easy and not confused with all the field stars as seen in the attached WikiSky image #1. HD 159073 looks a lot fainter visually than the attached DSS image #3 would indicate. Once you have it, go up to around 175-200x and 6380 will appear glued to the star, a faint glow that to my eye looks no larger than 2' dia visually.

SL 28 is the dark mass SE of 6380 in the attached image #2.

NGC 6380 is no friendlier to the professionals than to us. There are only a couple of papers devoted to it, the most detailed being (Ortolani et al, Astron. Astrophys. Suppl. Ser. 127, 471-477 (1998). It has a minor claim on galactic specialness because it's right on the edge of the Galactic bar, a region that has considerable gas flow taking a sharp left turn from the innermost spiral arm to funnel down the bar into the bulge. It's tempting to consider it a breezy place to live except that the breeze is only about 10,000 atoms per cubic cm, which is several thousand times less dense than the best earthbound lab vacuums. OTOH, the breeze is whisking along at a sprightly 67 kms a second. If you had a cat, it's whiskers might twitch. (Not if it's my cat, though, which only wakes up at the breeze of its food dish being filled.) That gas flow into the bulge is one reason why there are some 15 fairly young globulars in the bulge. 6380's [Fe/H] metallicity is -0.5, which, with other arcane details the astronomers adore, dates it being about 6 billion years old. It's a relative youngster out there. That doesn't mean the bar itself is that old; instead, some astronomers think galactic bars are a transitory feature that form and fade over several billion-year life cycles. There's some, but not conclusive, evidence that the bar that fed 6390 and a number of other bulge globulars of the same antiquity came and went a long time ago and the present bar is actually feeding yet another generation of globulars not even born yet. You can check back in 5 billion years or so to see if it's all true.

Let us know how the search comes out.

=Dana in SA