Maybe some of you experienced deep-sky observers can check me out on the following: Wednesday night I was trying to observe the many globular clusters in Ophiuchus from our local dark sky site (Mt. Pinos). Seeking to observe NGC 6366 with a 15 mm Panoptic eyepiece in my 8-inch SCT (a 28 arcminute field of view at 135x), I saw a bright yellow star which I estimated at about 5th magnitude within or in front of what looked like a fairly extensive but otherwise rather dim globular, and when I slewed around the area a bit I saw nothing else that looked like a globular. I wondered whether I had discovered a nova! My later research reveals that NGC 6366 is of magnitude 9.2 or 9.5 or 10 and that its angular dimension is about 13 arcminutes (another source says 8.3), both data being consistent with what I saw behind or around the bright star, but also that it is 16 arcminutes away from 47 Ophiuchi, a magnitude 4.6 star (SAO 141665). I now suspect that I was looking at this star, that what I saw around or behind it was not a globular but some sort of reflection from the glow of this bright star, and that I simply missed the real NGC 6366, probably because the light from this dim object is spread too broadly across its fairly wide extent. I would be interested in anybody else's observations of my "nova." (There's a photo of NGC 6366 on page 89 of the July 1992 issue of Sky & Telescope).
NexStar 8i SCT, Orion 80ED APO refractor, Orion 120 mm EQ refractor, 3.5-inch Questar
