[Chaos-l] Observing last night: 6210 (and tonight)

[Jon Stewart-Taylor]

I did manage to get out last night despite the very heavy dewing.   
Although the skies here aren't quite as good as the Holly Shelter Boat  
Ramp (due to the neighbor's glare-bomb), this location does have two  
key assets: Bathrooms, and electricity.  The latter was key, since the  
dewing was so heavy i had an 1/8th inch of water on my observing  
table, and the Telrad, finder scope, and even the eyepiece dewed over  
Really Quickly.

I'd anticipated that, though, and brought out the heavy-duty weaponry:  
a blow drier.  It helped with all the optics, and even kept my charts  
and observing log from becoming unusably soggy.

In addition to the tourist traps (M51, M5, M13, M92 (under-rated, by  
the way) and M57), i spent a lot of time hunting down NGC 6210, a 9th  
mag planetary nebula in Hercules.  It turned out to be pretty hard to  
find, and  while trying to use the finder to star-hop to it i  
"discovered"a very nice asterism near 56/57 Her, and a triple star SW  
of 51 Her.  I finally found the thing using just the Telrad and a  
medium-power eyepiece,   I'd been looking for a funny colored star  
which looked "fat", and that's how i finally identified 6210, but it  
wasn't the blue or green i'd been expecting.  At low powers, i swear  
the thing looked _brown_, and kinda purpleish at higher powers.  At  
about 180X, i thought it looked like it had a broken concentric ring  
around the larger center nebula, but at the time i attributed that to  
"averted imagination".

When i looked 6210 up on the net, i found it's called the "Turtle"  
nebula, because of some oblong protrusions thought to resemble a  
turtle's head and legs:

    APOD: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap981028.html
    Skyhound: observing.skyhound.com/archives/jun/NGC_6210.html

I wonder if that's what i thought i saw as the concentric ring.

At least one observer described the color as "sky blue", which  
definitely wasn't what i was getting.  I'm wondering if the pretty- 
nearly-fog moisture in the air was blocking or scattering the blue,  
leaving the redder colors to reach me at the eyepiece.

So, does anybody out there have any observations of 6210 in an 8-12  
inch scope?  Could you make out any detail?  What color was it under  
which conditions?  Anybody else observe "reddened" planetary nebulae  
under Very Moist conditions?

I expect to be out again tonight to get one last look at Scorpius  
before it's too late.  You're welcome to  join me if you can come out  
for a Monday night session.


J.
-- 
Jon Stewart-Taylor:  joncst at earthlink.net
Chapel Hill Astronomy: http://www.rtpnet.org/chaos
Cape Fear Astronomy: http://www.capefearastro.org/