I was curious if anyone had, like me, initially had trouble finding M11 because I kept mistaking it for a nebula. I was scanning for it at around 60x using a custom pushTo modification I made to my dob (a degree circle and an inclinometer, there's a very long thread about it on CN). My pushTo had been working very well throughout the night, always landing me very close to my target, always well within my field of view when using my 20mm XWA. So when I went hunting for M11, I thought it would be easy. Open clusters are generally very easy to spot, even with heavy light pollution : it's just a dense star field after all. But when I land on where M11 is supposed to be, I see nothing of the sort. Instead, I find what looked like just an elongated smudgy star. I figured this was some nebula I could come back to later, and kept scanning around for M11, to no avail. I even gave up, before trying again the next night. Sure enough, nothing but smudgy star again. So I think to myself "okay to hell with M11, I'm gonna play around with smudgy star" and I replace my 20mm XWA with my 5mm XWA (240x magnification) to get a closer look. And then, behold, an incredibly dense starfield just fills my entire AFOV. It was really breathtaking, all the more because I wasn't expecting it in the least. I had no idea open clusters could visually behave that way. I did not expect a low power nebulosity to turn into a high power field of well resolved stars. After the fact I rationalized it by considering that M11 is a distant (so angularly small) but very dense open cluster requiring high power to resolve its tightly packed stars, but I simply didn't see it coming and I let out a definite "holy ****" when I switched to the 5mm.
I'm curious if I'm the only one who saw it that way or if this has happened to any of you as well, and very open to hearing about other potential objects that behave similarly. I found the shift from one sight to a profoundly different one to be quite magical. This may just be me, but a big part of the magic of visual observing for me is manually designing your optical path using eyepieces, correctors, barlows, filters etc. and tailoring it to different objects. As a result, I always make it a point to look at M11 in that order : first as nebulous, then as cluster, a little tradition in memory of my first time observing it.
Edited by TicoWiko, 05 February 2025 - 06:15 AM.