The year moves on, and so does the night sky. In the Northern Hemisphere, summer's deep sky objects start to make an appearance in the late evenings - favourite bright stars such as Vega in Lyra and Arcturus in Boötes make a return from the east, and with them some stunning Messier deep sky objects. A couple of hours' observing in late April revealed some real stunners, including M13, and M92. Much lower down, I should have been able to see M3 in the constellation Canes Venatici, and M57 (the Ring Nebula) in the constellation of Lyra, but pretty bad light pollution from local industry towards my eastern horizon severely restricts observing low down deep sky objects with low surface brightness, such as planetary nebulae, galaxies and star clusters.

I always tend to use a 26mm or 20mm eyepiece initially when viewing deep sky objects, following successfully lining them up in my finderscope. Sometimes, as in the case of M81 (Bode's Nebula) and M82 (the Cigar Galaxy) in Ursa Major, the smaller eyepiece and wider angular field of view allows for some attractive framings of deep sky objects together. When it is time for closer inspection, I increase the magnification with my x2 Celestron Barlow lens. In my location, with moderate light pollution and no filter, most deep sky objects, being so faint, really don't bear greater magnification with a 200mm aperture reflector, except of course, bright star clusters and objects such as M42, the Orion Nebula .

So what my bagging of these two superb globular clusters, both of which looked stunning at x80 magnification? Both are globular clusters. M92 alternatively known as NGC 6341 was discovered in 1777 by Johann Elert Bode, and has an apparent magnitude of +6.4 making it one of the more conspicuous globular clusters. Charles Messier independently rediscovered it and catalogued it on March 18, 1781. It lies 26,700 light years distant in our galaxy's halo, like M13 in the constellation of Hercules.