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The one my buddy saw, and I happen to be there and see using his scope and eyepieces/barlow, was NGC 6543, the Cat's Eye. As for the other buddy who made a similar comment just last week, I'm unsure what object he viewed.

I saw what he said to be happening, but I don't know what optics these guys were using and quite possible they could have been using a poor high power ep and a good low power ep/good barlow, idk.

There might not be anything real happening here, but since two people found it to apparently improve the cs viewing (although possibly not real) I thought I'd toss it out there for people to comment. I don't have a barlow to investigate for myself if eyepiece quality is the root cause, or what else might be happening.

It may have just been an overall improvement in viewing but was attributed to cs's because that was the object viewed at the time it was noticed, I'll ask what high power ep's these guys use.

Steven

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Good, that object's central star gives me a "constant" to use in some tests (and will be well-placed for NSP). I did observe NGC 6543 a couple of nights ago in my NexStar 9.25, and the central star was visible pretty much all the time, although at certain magnifications, there were "sweet spots" where it seemed to stand out somewhat more. It appears fairly well at low to moderate power due to a brightening of a tiny inner shell right around the star that seems to help it a bit. At high power, it tends to come and go with the seeing, so even slight seeing changes might lead one to see an apparent change in visibility that was not actually due to some optical combination's effect. Of course, I use *really* high power on NGC 6543 (typically from 480x to as high as 744x), as that really brings out the inner arc-like detail in the main bright shell. Clear skies to you.

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David W. Knisely
Hyde Memorial Observatory
http://www.hydeobservatory.info

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