Out with a bang of celestial fireworks - and a galactic Mizar

March 10-11, 2008 - pm/am- T4S3 - 29 degrees

After an early stint, I came in - so did some clouds - and took a brief nap, then resumed observing from 11:30 pm to 1:30 am when it was clear again. I stopepd when the cold started to get to me. What really sticks in my mind was the incredible brilliance of M3. I have been checking this favorite globular with binoculars and small telescopes of late. Then I spent about two hours tracing out faint fuzzies in the 100 ED and (most of the time) in the 15-inch. My eyes and mind were entirely attuned to seeing the nearly unseeable - so when I turned the 15-inch to M3, ones of the best of globulars in a really empty stretch of sky between Arcturus and Cor Caroli, I felt I was seeing a fireworks explosion.

I started with the the 24mm Hyperion and quickly shifted to the 8mm - so I went from 70X to 211X and boy, you take a few hundred thousand stars, jam them together in a ball, and turn that huge, wonderfully precise, mirror towards them and they do sparkle! And this after watching a galaxy turn from a single to a double and back to a single again.

That last mentioned adventure began with my continuing exploration of the Virgo Cluster. (By the end of the Spring I intend to own this piece of celestial real estate - I'm going to make each little faint fuzzy a familiar friend!) I got off on the wrong foot last night, though, and didn't fully discover my error until i came inside and started playing with the charts and books.

What I did was take the familiar route of starting with Rho Virginis. This fifth magnitude star is really the brightest one in an arc of three and the three fit comfortably in binoculars, or a low-power telescope view., so it's very identifiable and rememorable. In fact, with the 100ED and a 30mm eyepiece I could fit the three stars at the bottom of the fov and at the top see three galaxies in a triangular arrangement that I immediately mistook for the familiar M84 and M86 - with companions.

But what bothered me form the start was I couldn't quite see the three faint stars that border M84 and serve as a further identifier for me. I saw two such stars, but the third was way out of place - or way, way too faint. Still, I thought I was at M84/86 and looked for - and could not find - the "eyes," another pair of galaxies nearby. Now I was getting frustrated. I had not brought charts out and while I was making quick sketches, things just weren't falling into place. I shifted to the 15-inch and used a 24mm Hyperion that gave me 73X and nearly a one degree fov.

Then i saw it. Not only were the three stars in a row missing from M84, but my M86 was really two galaxies - in fact, two nearly overlapping galaxies. The whole thing now looked like a galactic version of famous double star Mizar in the Big dipper! When you look at Mizar in a small scope you immediately see three stars in a triangle - Mizar, Alcor and a third, fainter one that just happens to be hanging around. Look carefully, however, and you see that Mizar itself is two stars, cleanly split., So it was with these galaxies and the answer came when I turned to O'Meara's book on the Messier objects and looked at his drawings of M59 and M60. I had already decided by looking at Starry Nights that these were the galaxies I was seeing, not M84 and M86.

In fact, I had fiour distinct galaxies in that field - M59 (which I had mistaken for M84) M60 (which I had mistaken for M86), a companion to M60 known as NGC4647 and the other galaxy in the original triangle - the sort of odd duck out - NGC4638. Now here's the interesting part, since it explains in part why M60 and its companion really fooled me at first. O'Meara writes:

But consider the following experience. Midway between M59 and M60, and to the south, is the 12-magnitude elliptical galaxy NGC4638. i find that by staring directly at NGC 4638 at 130X, M60's tiny companion burns into view in my piripheral vision! But, when I look directly at M60, the companion disappears. thus I refer to NGC 4647 at the 'disappeering galaxy.' With averted vision NGC 4647 really swells and displays definite inner and outer sections."

This also provides a good lesson in terms of not letting photographs be your guide. The photograph of this particular field makes M60 and NGC 4647 look almost equal. You would wonder how you could actually miss NGC 4647. But I missed it repeatedly last night. I'm not sure where I was looking when I first spotted it, but I know it was a shock to suddenly see it there, plain as could be, hugging M60.

My rough skecthes also led me to M58 and the huge and fascinating, M87. I plan to return to these over and over again, however, until I'm really familiar with them. Picking whole galaxies out of the dark, like picking grapes from a dangling cluster, is new to me. But the real fun is doing your own exploring, then coming back in and trying to make sense out of where you've been by comparing your results with those of other, more experienced, observers, not to mention photographs. And all the time you are dealing with the ineffable - with whole island universes of billions of stars that exist somewhere millions of years in your future.