In Episode SH051 of Star Hopping…
we’ll once again visit the Realm of the Galaxies. We’ll check out three new galaxies we haven’t seen before: Messier 85, a lenticular galaxy, Messier 88, a massive spiral galaxy, and the lost Messier galaxy, M91. This last one also has the distinction of being the faintest galaxy on the Messier list. See the previous episodes covering the Realm of the Galaxies:
- Part 1 – Episode 18
- Part 2 – Episode 19
- Part 3 – Episode 20
Intro
Well after our celebration for 50 episodes last time, we have another notable event that occurred this past week – my YouTube channel went past the 500 subscriber mark! I’ve been watching that for a while now and I had predicted that it would happen in the last two weeks of February. My prediction for the coveted 1000 subscriber mark is August of 2018. Let’s see how accurate that is! For those of you that have subscribed, thank you so much for your support!
So in this episode we’ve come around another year, and the Realm of the Galaxies are now 30 degrees above the eastern horizon about 10:30 PM local time. As I’ve mentioned previously in the three episodes in the Realm series, this is a very complicated part of the sky, and to positively identify a particular galaxy, you need to be pretty disciplined and step through the star hops carefully.
It’s really best to do this kind of galaxy hop with a fellow observer, so you can make the moves together each with your own telescope, to verify every galaxy along the way. So we have three interesting targets to do tonight, and the path kind of skirts around the main cluster of galaxies. We’ll check out the first target, right after this break; Stay Tuned.
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Credits for this Episode
- M85 image by Siggi Kohlert
- M88 image by Adam Block / NOAO / AURA / NSF
- M91 image by NOAO-AURA-NSF