It was the first deepsky object I ever found with my first purchased 60mm refractor in urban light pollution, some 40 years ago. After quite a few attempts. Fairly small field of view and a star atlas that left more to guess than to find.. (Norton's from early last century) Always kept a warm place in my heart.
This month I spotted him several times. After all, it was fairly cloud-free last week. In the course of a few cloud-free days, you can see that due to the increased smog blanket, the transparency of the sky decreases considerably. A quiet atmosphere, that is. Good for planets. For deepsky, that filth and fog in the air is a lot less fun.
The first sighting this month was with a 140 mm OMC140, a Maksutov. That was the best. The star of magnitude 13 next to the ring then becomes almost immediately visible. It is clear that it is lighter inside the nebula than outside it. The ellipse shape is obvious. On several (other) occasions I have the idea that I still see "something" with averted vision on the other side of the nebula. That turns out to be an even fainter asterisk (just close to the ring).
With larger instruments, of course, this becomes easilly visible. I never saw color. The central star? That was in the early nineties in Rijswijk with a C14, also during a transparent night in August.
With the 120 mm refractor I got more or less the same idea as with the OMC140. The DGM NPB filter picked it up surprisingly nicely, although the conditions had deteriorated slightly and such a filter on M57 at least does not have much effect.
The 102mm grab-n-go achromat also did surprisingly nicely last night, although the conditions were another step down. With great difficulty I detected "something" next to the nebula, our star of magnitude 13 of course. A flash twice in a minute, not enough for a full-fledged observation, but given that I know it's there, I saw it anyway. Perhaps auto-suggestion. Again, the filter showed the ring well, slightly better than without it. My UHC filter, on the other hand, is a little too punishing for this small telescope under these circumstances.
Click on the image for a better view. Main sketch was made at the OMC140. For the final positions of the tiny stars I peeked in Stellarium though..
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