Sagitarius RULES

The Messier objects in Sagitarius are AWESOME! I only had about an hour to really look for things and I didn't even get all the M objects in that constellation. M22 was just amazing. It seems bigger than M13 but didn't appear to have the surfance brightness.
I was trying for M24 but never found it, instead I think it was M23 or M25 but cant recall from work, It was an open cluster with gas clouds near by. WOW what a sight.
The constellation was low on the horizon at 1 am and realy didn't get good until 2 and by then I was beat myself.
I must remember the NODOZ and bug spray next time.

Leif, M24, the Star Cloud, is so large you would need a 2° to 3° fov eyepiece to surround it. It is easy to be right on it and not see the boundaries so you wouldn't know you are in the middle of it. I think it is best seen with binoculars.

edz

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Leif,

M22 is both bigger (29.0 vs 16.6') and brighter (5.8 vs. 5.1) han M13. Atmospheric extinction takes its toll on M22. You should see it from the southern hemisphere.

M24, which can be seen with the naked eye from a dark site, is a "star cloud" and is not a deep-sky object as such. It is, however, one of my favorite targets with a rich-field telescope. M24 was simply amazing through a 22" Starmaster at the Southern Skies Star Party in Bolivia last June.

Dave Mitsky

I have always felt that M22 was more spectacular than M13 in both my telescope and my binoculars. For some reason M22 is much better in the binoculars than M13. M22 is my favorite globular and M8 is as pretty as cluster can get this side of a photograph.

Sagittarius is great, globulars and fantastic clusters and nebula abound. Unfortunately for me up here in Michigan it is low to the horizon and in the direction of town, where my worst viewing is. I usually have to make trips out to a farm south of town at Sagittarius’s peak to enjoy the view best.

Daryl

You should see these when they are at the zenith! M22 is an easy naked eye object and is heaps better then M13. The colour in M20 is visible in a 10". M8 is a very bright naked eye object. Etc, etc.

If you have never paid a visit 'down under', you owe it to yourself to do so. You will not believe the skies!

cheers,

Maurice

I agree. The one time I got to observe at a really dark site last April, I stayed up until 2:00 AM local time just to see the Messiers in Scorpius and Sag. You could just about point your scope anywhere in the area and you'd see a beautiful DSO in the EP. One can easily spend an entire evening in the region and not exhaust all its treasures.

Clear nights ... dark sites,
Darren

One of the other guys at the event tried for that earlier in the evening, while it was still lower on the horizon and somewhat behind a tree and it wasn't worth bothering with at the time so he moved on. He also tried for the trifid and it wasn't very good that close to the horizon. but summer is coming soon, it was definitely a taste of things to come!