Triffid Nebula, again

Nice sky and good eyepiece make a difference

I have seen those wonderful pictures of M20 and thought, why can’t I see something even close to those pictures?  Now, I have a clean Bortle 5 sky and a good telescope, so I decided to invest in a good eyepiece. I’ve heard the good reviews about the Explore Scientific eyepieces, but unfortunately here in China they are beyond my reach. But I still wanted a premium eyepiece and especially one with large apparent field of view (AFOV).

This year´s birthday brought
 me a new eyepiece.

I ended up buying a Celestron Luminos 15mm that gives me 100x and 0.82° of true field of view (TFOV) to easily resolve many DSOs and have more field to contrast them with the sky. Another point in favor of the Luminos is the retractable eyecup. It pops up by turning the equatorial rubber band of the eyepiece and stays firm so the eye orbit can lean on it avoiding any intruding and undesirable sense of light from the outside.

 Without a filter but with very good dark eye adaptation and averted vision, I could notice the cracks (designated as Barnard 85) in between the lobes around the double star HIP88333. That portion is an emission nebula and looks red-pink in the pictures.

The upper portion is less noticeable with direct vision. It lies around the star HIP88298 and can be mistaken as the glance of the star but indeed it is part of the reflective portion of the nebulae.

I bet a filter will reveal more details in this amazing and vast object, but for now I feel really amazed by the view given by both a less light polluted sky and a premium eyepiece.

Clear and dark skies

LG

Edited by Jennifer Steinger (editor in chief)