Telescope Reviews: Your favorite combination (retry)

Hi Lumpy,

Not an easy question to answer, there are so many wonderful choices, and M 42 is hard to beat.

One of my favorite such combo fields starts with NGC 6723 and includes several different types of objects just to its south. In the same field there is a double star, a couple of emission nebulae, a reflection nebula, a large dark nebula, and even a tiny galaxy. The truth be told, you do need to scan around a bit to see everything, but it is a fascinating area. For more info, look here;

http://tinyurl.com/588sfb

I've seen this in many telescope/eyepiece combinations, but the best of all was probably through a 25" Obsession and a 31mm Nagler from Coonabarabran, near Siding Springs, NSW, Australia. Jumping over to the 20" with the 31mm was also pretty good, with a little bigger field thrown in.

But my all-time favorite combo had to be the Ghost of Jupiter, as seen through the 82" at McDonald, with its 5.5 arc-minute FOV, using an old 40mm Televue eyepiece, this was an almost indescribable image that is forever burned into my retina. Here is what I wrote about it at the time, November 2006;

NGC 3242, Ghost of Jupiter, Hydra
"Well, this might have been the best object of the weekend, Saturn notwithstanding. It was just as I remembered it to be when I viewed it through this same telescope in 2000, during the TSP. This PNe has a large slightly oval shape and shows multiple shells, with a bright central star, several other observers used the word "bagel". The innermost ring is small and dark, and had a purple-tinged outer edge. The next shell outwards is a bright crepe-like ring, shocking aqua in color. This is followed by a broader ring that is distinctly
salmon or pink in color, my notes call it a "filling", and virtually everyone saw it this way. Lastly was another aqua ring, thinner than the pink ring, and not quite as vibrant in hue as the other aqua ring; it is almost perfectly uniform in width and looked like a racetrack. Curiously, the real-time view in this telescope looks nothing like any picture of this object that I have seen, and I've searched extensively to find a picture that even slightly resembles
what I saw. None at all. To see this, I guess you need to book a night on the 82"..."

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Paul
25" Obsession
5.5" Newt - finder (Cometcatcher)
Hutech 22 X 100 binos w/LPS-P2 filters
Canon 10 X 30 IS binos