John Herschel discovered NGC 6416 = h3702 = D612? on 3 Aug 1834 and recorded "Cl class VIII of stars 11m; fills field; not rich; stars in zig-zag lines." His position is accurate. James Dunlop possibly discovered the cluster earlier on 13 May 1826 and described "a cluster of small stars of mixt magnitudes, about 15' diameter, irregular figure." His position, though, is nearly 40' west of the cluster and actually falls on the east side of M6, 13' from the center. So, his identification is uncertain though seems to describe NGC 6416 better.

200/250mm - 8" (6/19/82): almost two dozen faint stars, large, scattered, not impressive as fairly coarse.

400/500mm - 17.5" (8/2/97): best view at 100x as it fills the 220x (9mm Nagler) field. The most detached portion consists of a large cloud of at least 15' diameter and containing roughly 75 stars. There are four brighter stars (including mag 8.6 SAO 209208) but most of the stars are pretty uniform in brightness and fairly evenly distributed at 100x. The cluster may extend further north than the region described above but the star density quickly decreases to the general Milky Way appearance.

Notes by Steve Gottlieb