This is the DSO that taught me to look up the surface brightness for visual observing targets:
https://telescopius.com/deep-sky-objects/ngc-5466/globular-cluster/open-clusterAt first glance, with a magnitude of 9.7 it should be easy to see in my scope (C9.25) - or so I tought.
After fruitlessly searching for a couple of nights it dawned on me that the brightness is spread out over a largish area and unlike a galaxy it does not have a particularly bright core. A surface brightness of 23.5 mag/arcsec² meant I didn't have a chance in medium-LP skies (a spot close to home, but a bit better than my backyard), and I only spotted it once I got to a darker site. And then it was pretty underwhelming.
The ease at which this object was captured by a sensor then convinced me to do more EAA, as with just 350s integration I could already see more on the screen than I ever could in the eyepiece - even from my Bortle 7 home. Finally, I grabbed this dataset in the summer of '21 so I could have a proper, deeper exposure.
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