Magnitude of stars near Messier 57

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003 18:52:50 GMT, Starstuffed penned:
From my spot on Mt. Pilchuck, last night I noticed a couple of extremely
faint stars immediately to the north and roughly parallel to the major axis
of the Ring Nebula. These two stars are approximately 30" from the northern
edge of the nebula. They can be seen on page 1165 of Burnham where the blue
light image shows them to be roughly of the same brightness as the very
illusive central star in the nebula. In moments of very good seeing, I was
able to detect a third parallel member in the same line established by the
more obvious two. Does anyone know the magnitude of these two or three
stars? I suspect they are beyond the 14th magnitude and possibly the 15th
which would indeed put them right there in the same magnitude range as that
illusive central star and would serve to show just how visible that central
star would be if it were not for the faint nebulosity in the "hole" of the
M57.

Martin,

This might help:
http://casa.colorado.edu/~rachford/a...charts/m57.pdf

The original data is from
ftp://ftp.nofs.navy.mil/pub/outgoing...quence/m57.dat

I'm not sure about the completeness of the data, but I've
included stars from this list down to V=16.5 on the plot (sans
decimal point). I.e., there may be other stars brighter than
that but not depicted. Also, the central star is not included.
This is a "not ready for prime time" thing I've put together for
myself as useful telescopic limiting magnitude field, so the
aspect ratio of the plot isn't necessarily right, and I've made
no attempt at a "real" map projection, it's not very pretty,
etc. The rendering of M57 itself is my own approximation of the
main ring based on photos. In any case, I'm guessing you are
seeing the two magnitude 15.0 stars, but I'm not sure about the
third.

Brian Rachford