The evening of 5 September, 2001 provided pretty good skies here in Rockville, so I got out the 18 inch (2022mm fl) and put it on it's polar aligning platform. I then proceeded to view AH Hercules.
I started off with a 35 mm Panoptic to get the field stars, and worked my way down to the 4.8mm Nagler to get the 12.8 (my estimate) magnitude AH Hercules to come into clear view.
The star was also visible in the 10mm eyepiece, but not as clearly. I probably could have gotten an additional magnitude out of the scope using the 4.8mm eyepiece. The next 3 images show stars visible at each of three magnifications. Additionally, chart 1 shows the progression of stars used to locate the narrow AH Her field.
The star pointed to by the blue line was the dimmest star visible in the 35mm pan field (nagnification 58x) from my site. From here, I progressively used a 20mm nagler, and finally the 13mm nagler to bring up the star shown n the field below. The 13mm field was magnified 156x.
Using the 13mm, I was able to go a bit deeper and caught the next star in the field. This star is indicated by the gold line. The target, AH Her was not visible at this magnification. From the 13mm field, I progressed to the 10mm field. At this magnification, I was able to glympse AH Her, but could not see it steadily. To get a good view of the star, I used the 4.8mm Nagler to produce the field shown below. The 4.8mm field is at 421x.
