Tonight was a good night grazing through the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. I went out at 9:45pm, with good seeing. Unfortunately with it being the middle of summer, we are limited to very little true darkness. This combined with my eyes not being properly dark adapted resulted in a disappointing naked-eye limiting magnitude. I swung over to Saturn first, a spectacular view. Then I started some deep-sky observing. I found M71, a globular cluster first. It was underwhelming compared to some of the other globs out there. Next was M27, the Dumbbell Nebula. It was big, bright, and nice looking. There was more contrast at 150x, and I could make out the dumbbell shape to it. On to M56, another globular like M71. I could barely resolve stars with averted vision. M57 wasn’t new, but looked great. I then headed to open cluster M29. It was surrounded by a dense region of stars, which made it hard to distinguish. I eventually confirmed it. M39 was another open cluster; bright and loose. It looked good in the finder scope. I wrapped up the night with M11, an amazing, dense open cluster. This rich cluster was what I was use to from the winter skies. The moon started to climb higher above the horizon so I called it a night at 10:30pm. I found 6 new Messier objects, bringing my total up to 52/110! (I did not take these pictures)
M11
M27
