OR: Hickson 68 and a menagerie of bright and dark nebulae
Muriel Dulieu Holzer
This was the last of three evenings in Glenn County, Monday June 15th 2026. I used my 18” Obsession with 5 mm and 7 mm eyepieces for planetary nebulae, a 9 mm eyepiece for galaxies and small nebulae, and a 24 mm eyepiece for wide objects and galaxy clusters.
I started with NGC 5033. Why NGC 5033? I was just browsing the star map on SkySafari Pro and it caught my attention. NGC 5033 is a large, bright, spiral galaxy in Canes Venatici. I wondered if I looked at it last year as it hosted a type II supernova in June 2025, SN 2025mvn.
In my 18”, it looked like an elongated galaxy of ratio 2:3 tilted in the field of view from 1.30 o’clock to 7.30 o’clock. Its disk seemed slightly mottled with a faint star at its bottom left edge. The disk brightened towards the core with maybe a star-like nucleus at its center. The galaxy lay below an upside down triangle of faint stars, itself below a triangle of brighter stars with one corner of it containing two stars.
It had been a while since I had looked at Arp galaxies, they are amongst my favorites. So I turned on a list of all Arp galaxies on Sky Safari Pro in order to highlight them on the sky map. My first glance landed on the Mice, Arp 242, a pair of colliding spiral galaxies with long narrow tidal tails in Coma Berenices, one of my absolute favorite Arps. I looked at them before but I wanted to have another look. It turned out to be really challenging to find them. They were faint and I was lacking stellar context without an optical viewfinder and using a 9 mm eyepiece. The PiFinder seemed to bring me to an area of the sky that did not completely match the stars on SkySafari. I may have seen them in passing but I am not sure. I gave up after an hour of following star trails as I did not want to spend all night on this. There were many more objects I wanted to look at.
Earlier in the day, Mazen and Steve had talked about Hickson 68 in Canes Venatici. Mazen was currently looking at it, so I decided to go for it as well. Hickson 68 is the third-brightest cluster in the Hickson catalog. It contains 5 lenticular and spiral galaxies. Next to them lay a wide double star with a 6.5-magnitude red primary, HD 121197, and a 10.5-magnitude blue companion, BD +41 2434s, that appeared white to me. In the 24”, NGC 5350, a barred spiral on the left, looked roundish and showed a brightening with direct vision and a stellar core with averted vision. The two other fainter lenticular galaxies, NGC 5355 and NGC 5358, on the bottom right, looked elongated and showed a core with averted vision. In my 18”, the two merging lenticular galaxies NGC 5353 and NGC 5354, on top, appeared oval with a brighter core each.
Looking again at the Snow Globe Nebula, NGC 6781, a planetary nebula in Aquila, in the 24” this time, it appeared white, round, and mottled. It was brighter on the left with a darkening in the middle that appeared with averted vision.
It was past midnight and Scorpius was going down towards the horizon. Looking at it, I saw a glow in line and to the left of the two stars making up its tail, Lesath (Upsilon Scorpii) and Shaula (Lambda Scorpii). The glow was M7, Ptolemy’s cluster, a large and bright open cluster (Mag 3.29).
Then Mazen mentioned the false comet, also in Scorpius. If one looks just above the lowest stars of Scorpius just before the turn of the tail, Zeta1 and Zeta2 Scorpii, one can see with naked eyes the open cluster NGC 6231 that forms the head of the “comet”. The tail of the “comet” going towards Theta Ophiuchi is formed by the two open clusters Collinder 316 and Trumpler 24. It was a pretty sight to see this (false) comet entirely made of stars like a diamond brooch in the sky.
Looking at the false comet with the night vision handheld, near the tail of the “comet” lay a giant emission nebula called the Prawn Nebula (IC 4628). Gliding the night vision device left and up along the Milky Way from Scorpius’ stinger towards Sagittarius, another giant emission nebula located in Scorpius appeared, the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334). It showed 3 cute toe-beans and a larger metacarpal pad.
Above and to the left of it, a roundish nebula appeared, the War and Peace Nebula, NGC 6357. The War and Peace Nebula is home to the cluster Pismis 24, home of some of the most massive and luminous stars known. Further left and up were two round nebulae against each other looking like a snowman on its side, Sharpless 2-12 and Sharpless 2-13. Continuing left and up, one entered Sagittarius and I could see the Lagoon Nebula, Messier 8, which was very bright. It contains an embedded cluster NGC 6530. It was followed, up and left, by the Eagle Nebula, M16, that contains the Pillars of Creation, and by the Omega Nebula, M17, which was very bright.
After this, Steve invited Mazen and me to look at a few globular clusters on his 24”. We first looked at M80 in Scorpius. It is one of the densest globular clusters in the Milky Way. It had a dense core of stars with an explosion of star trails around that made it look like a representation of the sun. Then we looked at M107 in Ophiuchus, a fainter globular cluster with smaller stars and star trail extensions zigzagging like crab legs. It was surrounded by three brighter stars at a 90 degree angle from the center. We then moved to M5 in Serpens. This is one of the oldest known globular clusters (~13 billion years). It was bright, dense and surrounded by a sprawl of stars like a shimmering carpet. Our last globular cluster of the night was M92 in Hercules. M92 is even older than M5 at ~13.8 billion years, almost as old as the Universe. It looked like a well balanced globular cluster with a dense bright core and short dancing star trails extending outward.
It was already past 2 am. I went back to my 18” and tried to find the Prawn Nebula (IC 4628) with my 9 mm eyepiece. I tried with and without a NPB filter but unfortunately it was very low on the horizon (less than 7° altitude) and I could not see it.
Then I remembered that we had talked earlier about the Coma Berenices Galaxy Cluster, Abell 1656. The Coma Cluster is a very different cluster than the Hercules Galaxy Cluster, Abell 2151, which I looked at 2 days earlier. The Hercules Cluster is a young cluster in which nearly half the galaxies are spiral galaxies, many of them interacting with each other. Comparatively, the Coma Cluster has had many more billions of years of processing, and its galaxies are mostly elliptical and lenticular. It is dominated by two giant galaxies, NGC 4889 and NGC 4874, fattened from feasting on their companions. They are sitting at the center of the cluster, around which many smaller galaxies revolve. In my 18”, I could see a glow for NGC 4889 and NGC 4874, but unfortunately the cluster was too low to see it well, around 23 degrees or less. I did not realize that it was an early evening object.
To end the evening, Steve invited Mazen and me to come look at a few remarkable objects in his 24” using his night-vision device at 34x with a 7nm H-alpha filter. In honor of Akarsh’s article in Sky & Tel https://skyandtelescope.org/sky-and-telescope-magazine/inside-the-august-2026-issue/, I suggested that we look at a few dark nebulae.
We started with the Ink Spot (Barnard 86), a dark nebula, paired with the open cluster NGC 6520, in Sagittarius. The open cluster looked like a sloth with its arms up, a disk of stars made up the head, with two bright stars for the eyes. Its left eye was a red star. A few scattered stars made up the body and legs, and from the body, there were two long star trails going up for the arms. On its left lay the Ink Spot, a dark boxy patch of ratio 1:2, its size proportional to the diameter of the cluster. It was hard to tell where it started and where it ended. And to the left of the Ink Spot, lay a red giant star, HD 164562.
We moved on to the two dark nebulae Barnard 92 and Barnard 93 in Sagittarius. On the left was B92, often nicknamed the Black Hole Nebula, it looked like a black oval shape. Next to it on the right was B93. It looked like an upside down dark human silhouette with two legs. Both dark nebulae were drawn against the bright background of M24, the Sagittarius Star Cloud.
We turned next to the Eagle Nebula, M16, in Serpens Cauda. It contains the cluster NGC 6611 and dark clouds that form the Pillars of Creation. The Eagle Nebula looked very different with the night vision device, it was much larger. It looked like a bloated V shape on the side, with the vertex on the right and the arms of the V going to the left. In the middle was a splash of ink separating the two arms of the V, with another splash of ink below the V and defining its lower arm. A bright disk was attached to the lower arm of the V, just under it, and the upper arm had a small bright protuberance on top. Two small black prongs were going down from the top of the upper arm, they were the famous Pillars of Creation. In the middle of it all was an elongated star cluster parallel to the arms of the V.
We looked next at the Swan Nebula, M17, in Sagittarius. I could not recognize it at all with the night vision device. The reason was that the Swan I am used to seeing was a very small part of the gigantic bright region we were looking at. The whole area looked like a giant butterfly with two bright wings and a dark body made of a dark nebula. The right wing was brighter than the left wing. Along the upper right part of the body of the butterfly, lay two small black disks. The head of the swan as we are used to seeing it was a very small bright area wrapping around the lower small black disk. The tail of the swan was shooting up from its neck towards the middle of the right butterfly wing.
From there, we went to the Lagoon Nebula, M8, in Sagittarius. A large bright HII region that contains a star cluster, NGC 6530, and the Hourglass, a small compact zone of star formation in the center of the Lagoon. The Lagoon looked like a large bright collection of pools connected together. One can easily imagine the water flowing around. One pool on the right of the main pool contained a round star cluster in its middle. The central pool contained the Hourglass Nebula, which looked like two fat stars touching each other.
Next we looked at NGC 6559 and the larger Sharpless 2-29 region in Sagittarius. NGC 6559 is a compact star-forming region mixed with glowing red hydrogen gas (emission nebula), blue reflection clouds (reflection) and dark dust lanes (absorption). Sharpless 2-29 is a large highly active star-forming region and emission nebula. In the eyepiece, we could see a large bright area with two small circular nebulae at the bottom (Sharpless 2-31 and 2-32), and on the top right, a small arc-shaped bright cloud, like a C pointing to the left (NGC 6559).
Close by was the Trifid Nebula, M20, a red emission nebula trisected by dark dust lanes in Sagittarius. In the eyepiece, it looked like a round mottled glow with four prominent dark lanes (despite the nickname) looking like a loose, tired H (Barnard 85).
To my great delight, my favorite image of Akarsh’s article was next, the Cocoon Nebula (IC 5146) with Barnard 168 in Cygnus. The Cocoon Nebula is an emission and reflection nebula containing a young cluster and sitting in the middle of a long dark nebula (Barnard 168). In the eyepiece, the Cocoon Nebula looked like a bright bloated 9 pointing right, inside a dark nebula extending toward 4.30 o’clock. The dark nebula was not entirely obvious, likely due to the fact that the night vision device catches the infrared emitted by stars hidden in the dark nebula.
We then went to Barnard 142, a dark nebula in Aquila. This one was hard to see. I thought I perceived a darker lane going from 9 o’clock to 5 o’clock.
Since Mazen missed the Veil Nebula last night, we looked at the Eastern Veil to end the evening. We used the night vision device and a dual band filter H alpha + OIII in the 24”. The Eastern Veil was bright, almost opaque, looking solid. It was a particularly beautiful sight to end an extraordinary weekend.
-Muriel
James Webster
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