Galaxy games

March 1, 2008 - three good hours of observing

Here's the bottom line: With my skies (mag 5.5) and an 80mm ED refractor with a 24mm Hyperion eyepiece in it I can observe galaxies out to about 20 million light years. I can see them to about 20-40 million light years out. After that the best I do is detect them -say I saw them - maybe.

Remember - the numebrs used here are small 12, 20, 40 etc. - but they have the word million after them. That's oh-so-easy to say - oh-so-hard to digest. Also remember - I'm using the 80ED to improve my observing skills. The more I can learn to see with this small scope, the more things tend to leap out at me when I use the 15-inch - things I didn't see before.

Tonight M81 and M82, high in the north and at about 12 million light years, are wonderful. They are bright enough and large enough for me to spend hours trying to squeeze out details. I didn't do that tonight, but I did observe them long enough to appreciate the differences. I saw strong hints of the spiral structure of M81 and the mottling of dark dust clouds in the cigar-shaped M82.

Move out to the next level - M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, at about 15 million light years and the details are still there. I ran into a small technical problem because when I was looking it was too high in the sky for the way the telescope was mounted. I could only track it for a few minutes before the diagonal hit the base of the pier. But I got a decent look.

M101 is about at the same distance, but it's larger with lower surface brightness. I think it would be harder to get detail out of it. It's actually rated as a little brighter than M51, but it's almost as big as the full moon. M51 spreads its light over less than half that area, so it is easier to see well.

These are what I consider "observable" in the best meaning of that word. Move out to Leo and M65 - M66 and now you're starting to push it. These are 20-25 million light years from us and while reasonably bright, I think I would be hard pressed to find much to say about them and my drawing would be a pretty nondescript blob. Their companion, NGC 3628 is a phantom, putting in an appearance in my small scope only when I get my head at just the right angle and my averted vision suddenly turns on at full volume.

Moving to the next "triplet" in Leo, M95, M96 and M105, the story is different still. These are not as easy to see as M65 and M66. With M95, M96 and M105 I have to search - not real hard, but they don't jump out and bite me just because I happen to be looking in the right neighborhood. By the numbers they should be about the same as the other Leo group, but I don't see them that way. They're in the same ball park distance wise - about 26.5 million light years. They do have interesting features - but they're not going to give them up to my diminutive 80mm scope on the light-polluted Eastern Seaboard.

M58? Give me a break. O'Meara says this is a good place to start if you want to get to know the crowd of Virgo galaxies. I do. But for once I think he's wrong. I had a terrible time trying to pin down M58 with any confidence. it was fairly low at the time, which didn't help, but so were other galaxies in the area. I'm sure I was looking in the right place and once in a while I was sure I saw it - once in a while. On the other hand, I thought nearby M59 and M60 were far simpler, and as I prowled around I had no trouble identifying the field that includes M84 and 86, plus three other companions. Not bad, Five whole galaxies in one field of view in an 80mm scope functioning at just 25X!.

Incidentally, the directions O'Meara gives for starting at M58 are excellent. You first locate Epsilon Virginis. This is easy because it is magnitude 3 and roughly halfway between Arcturus and Denebola at the tail of Leo. Five degrees to its west - on the same line roughly - is Rho Virginis. Not hard, especially if at this point you use low powered binoculars. Picking Rho out in binoculars - or a telescope atlow power - is a snap. It's the brightest star in the middle of a small arc of three stars oriented north-south. This really becomes your anchoring point for exploring this incredibly galaxy-rich sector of the sky. Every time I got lost in the galaxy mine field, I came back to Rho.

But you start your exploration by finding 20 Virginis just two degrees west of Rho - easy again. M58 is supposed to form the apex of a triangle with thee two anchors. Not easy. I think I saw it. But when I finally gave up after about half an hour of prowling about and making double and triple sure I was on the right street, I backed off and decided to look for the galaxy pair, M59 and M60 - and these jumped right out at me. So I'm not sure why O'Meara starts with M58, "one of the brightest," int he rgeion. I'd start with this pair.

Do keep in mind - I didn't observe any of these., I saw them - in some cases barely detected them. But these are out in the 55 million light year territory. It is just simply fantastic that with such a small - I'll call it "people-sized" - scope you can manage such feats! And, of course, you should be able to easily do the same with large binoculars, such as 20X80s. It almost seems unfair to look at themw ith the 15-inch ;-)